


Undo This Storm

by serpentinerose



Category: Cain Saga and Godchild, House M.D.
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alexis' C+ Parenting, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Dubious Consent, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Jizabel Needs Therapy, Jizabel is not ok, M/M, Medical Inaccuracies, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Mild Gore, Modern AU, Self-Denial, Wow this all sounds really awful
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:41:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 41,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23673286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serpentinerose/pseuds/serpentinerose
Summary: Jizabel is a talented and reclusive doctor, and Cassian is his patient who knows too much. There are too many secrets, people are awful and messy and scary, and absolutely nothing is resolved. Feature very limited cameos from the cast of House, M.D.
Relationships: Cain C. Hargreaves/Riffael "Riff" Raffit, Cassian/Jizabel Disraeli, Jizabel Disraeli/Cassandra Gladstone
Comments: 26
Kudos: 10





	1. before you my home was in the wind and surf

**Author's Note:**

> Friends, I am alive and apparently am still writing for this fandom. I'm sorry to say that I'll probably never continue On the Coldest Winter Night, as many of you have surmised. It has been years, y'all.
> 
> I started working on this about five years ago, on and off and off and on, but this quarantine season has really given me the time and motivation to work on it again. There are five chapters written (out of seven?), and I'm hoping to continue updating regularly. I have a pretty good idea for how this story will play out. I can't guarantee I won't abandon it, but I hope I will finish something for once.
> 
> The story. It's really dark. I think it may be too dark, especially in the later chapters, so please, approach with extreme caution. I think you should probably just skip it altogether. Very clearly, I am not a medical doctor. The story is a lot more character-driven than it is plot-driven. Please suspend ALL disbeliefs. I also play fast and loose with canon timeline, and some important details are modified.
> 
> Chapter titles are all lyrics from Nightwish's EXCELLENT new album, Human. :||: Nature. 
> 
> I wrote this because our fandom is small, and Jizabel Disraeli is one of the best characters ever created, and I figured someone out there shares the same feelings.
> 
> Also, if you are in this fandom, you really should be reading Ivy_in_the_Garden's works!

In all honesty, Jizabel should thank his lucky stars that he has landed this job. Twenty-nine year old, barely out of fellowship, and already he’s scored a highly coveted attending position in the Diagnostic Department at Princeton-Plainsboro under the infamous Gregory House.

He supposes he should consider himself quite lucky, or at least satisfied with his skills and qualifications as a doctor. But in truth, he’s pretty sure the only reason House hired him is because his apparent misanthropy amused the older man. Most likely House looked at Jizabel as a mini-version of himself, all sharp edges and brittle laughs and false arrogance, and potentials, yes, all the potentials for future greatness because he was ruthless in his work and fearless in endangering his patients. 

And, for some reason, House has liked that even as he hated those same qualities in the hopeful applicants. Dr. Chase told him it’s because of his British accent and made a stupid expression with his eyebrows. Jizabel barely gave him an acknowledging glare at the trite joke.

He actually thinks it must be because he makes a mean cup of cappuccino, which is why he’s always on coffee duty now, and even Chase compliments him on his coffee, so he assumes he can’t be that bad. It’s comforting to know that should he ever be fired, he would still have a flourishing career as an indie coffee barista type. He can even do the fancy foam art if he wants to, and he does, in the sun-drenched kitchen of his green-and-yellow apartment, hand steadily shaking the pot of fresh steamed milk (oat, most of the time, and almond when he wants a change) into a painstakingly detailed design over his porcelain cup. Two shots of espresso, plenty of milk, and no sugar, just how he likes it. Along with a cocktail of lithium and paliperidone, which is definitely not how he likes it, but he wears the face of a responsible person, and he complies.

At least, he puts up with it whenever he actually remembers that he has a _condition_ , as father had so delicately put it. He’s fine without the pills, and sometimes he’s better, more productive and more energetic and just plain _more_. 

He just doesn’t like it so much when that _more_ turns into unquenchable rage, when he starts to do things that scare even him. He doesn’t like the crash either because then he’s all listless and numb and just generally a dump on the couch, so he’ll take the pills then and be at sixty percent of his normal self rather than twenty five, give or take. Sometimes, it’s bearable being sixty percent. 

It’s a horrible feeling to _need_ to depend on something you abhor so.

House knows, of course. Given enough time (one week at the most), the old man would have figured it out himself, but Jizabel had gone up to House on his first day as an applicant and bluntly said, “There’s something you should know about me.” 

To which Gregory House, M.D., blinked, clearly unimpressed, and said, “And you think I don’t already know?” He’d scoffed and walked away, and they had never spoken of it since. Jizabel thinks that House is pretty okay for such a sour old douche, even if he makes a show out of complaining that Jizabel’s coffee is too strong, not strong enough, and just plain inedible, all in the span of five minutes before he gulps the whole cup down and demands more.

But it’s Jizabel’s day off today, and he’s definitely not going to spend it thinking of work, or House, who is only mildly entertaining at best. He calmly sips at the perfect foamy surface of his cappuccino and idly wonders if he should have taken a picture before ruining it, but he shrugs it off and pops the tablets into his mouth, washing them down with a mouthful of scalding hot liquid. One. Two. Well, no difference. Just another day of fighting through the haze.

Leaving the empty cup in the sink for later, he turns over to the fridge and rummages through it for a ripe avocado or two for his morning shake, slightly disappointed when all he comes up with are three romaine hearts still in their sealed bag and a block of vegan cheddar. Horrid thing, a total mistake on his part. Grocery-shopping time, he decides, and pats his stomach absently. He’s never really hungry and barely remembers that a body requires sustenance, but eating is a duty, and he is nothing if not dutiful.

“Good morning, Dr. Disraeli!” the landlady calls down as he passes under her carnations-covered window boxes, and he doubles down on his effort to go unnoticed, his eyes glued onto the ground as his footsteps quicken.

They get along well, he and Mrs. Gladstone, in that she greets him whenever she sees him, and he ignores her every time she tries. He knows she dislikes the way pigeons would flock to his window in the morning, but he thinks that’s only fair because he detests her _son_ , one Cassandra Gladstone, a self-professed spoiled playboy who claims the condo next to Jizabel’s—the one with the better view, courtesy of his mother the landlady—and whose wandering gaze always lands on Jizabel’s ass. 

Sometimes Jizabel really considers not taking his medications, like right now, because Cassandra Gladstone is lounging about the second-floor balcony in his stupid boxers and stupid tousled guess-what-I-did-last-night hair that, in another world, might have appealed to Jizabel, though he highly doubts that. Just the sight of the man sends shivers of disgust down his spine, and Jizabel tells himself to walk faster, quieter, and he prays to God that the bane of his existence hasn’t heard his mother’s cheerful greeting.

God must really hate him, and for good reasons. He reaches up out of habit and caresses the black crucifix beneath his shirt. Cassandra, bleary eyed and no doubt thoroughly fucked in the most literal sense of the words, has spotted his target. “Darling!” he cries out, smoothing a hand over his hair ineffectively and almost charmingly—almost. “I haven’t seen you in ages!”

Lie number one. He sees Cassandra almost everyday, to his chagrin. Being a neighbor to the man definitely does not help.

“Won’t you come up?” the brown-eyed, brown-haired man continues, ignoring Jizabel’s flat stare, “I was about to make some breakfast, and I would like nothing more than for you to share it with me.” 

Lie number two. He knows _exactly_ what Cassandra would like, and it’s not simply sharing a meal with him.

“No, thank you,” Jizabel calmly replies, though his chest tightens minutely from the irritation already building under his skin. “I have just eaten, actually. I’m off to work now.” Lie number three, except it’s his lie, so maybe it doesn’t count.

Cassandra lets out a disappointed whine. “Can’t you take a day off sometimes? I’ve missed seeing you around.” His eyes take on a predatory gleam. “No one else can quite, hmm, _charm_ me like you do, darling.”

God, he hates Cassandra and his stupid pet names and his stupid smiles, and he swears his medications are not working effectively. He wants to strangle the bastard, and his body shakes with tension. 

But his father has taught him to be patient, polite, and a perfect gentleman, so Jizabel only courteously says, “I’m afraid I cannot. Some of us actually have to work to afford to live here.” That was meant as a spiteful comeback, but Cassandra only laughs loudly as if Jizabel has just said the wittiest thing. 

“One of these days I’ll have to visit that hospital of yours for a full-body check up.” 

Can the man get any more annoying? Jizabel feels like he’s losing brain cells just standing there on the pavement listening to him talk. “Of course, Mr. Gladstone. Now, I really m-“

“Please, please! Aren’t we way past the last name stage? Cassandra, please, my dear _Jizabel_.”

His heart pounds. He needs to leave. He feels the rage rising, his lungs constricting. He needs to get out of here, and so he does.

_Don’t say another word, don’t say another word, don’tsayanotherword…._

Cassandra indeed says something else, but thank God it was just a “Goodbye!” in his best bedroom voice. Subtle. 

By the time Jizabel makes it around the corner, he immediately slams his knuckles against the old brick wall, slowly slides down to the ground on one knee, and just _breathes_.

* * *

The supermarket is an explosion of sights and sounds, and he hates it. The mass throngs like ants toward crumbs of bread, and he wants to crush them beneath his feet. _Americans_ , his father would have sneered. _Humans_ , he argues, not forgetting to include himself in the epithet. His little green basket is filled with vegetables and fruits, and he thinks this day may even be OK if he can get out of the store without any human interaction. Self-checkout has changed his life in recent years.

He sighs. The self-checkout line is long today. He estimates that with nine people ahead of him and only three working machines, it would take a minimum of fifteen minutes before it was his turn at a kiosk. Most of the line consists of impatient-looking men and women grabbing a quick work lunch, or so he assumes from the way they keep tapping their feet and looking at their phone while waiting. There’s a little boy five persons ahead of him pushing a cart of what looks like a week’s worth of frozen food, and he sneers inwardly, wondering what kind of parents would let a child buy himself such sustenance. 

Children are intolerable, with very few exceptions, he muses. Perhaps the kid’s parents are at their wit’s ends.

He takes the long way home through a park, where the weekend farmer's market is always held. He never gets a weekend off, so he hasn’t made it there in quite a while, but he does like to go through the park on the off-chance that he catches a glimpse of bleating goats and sheep on his way to and from work. It isn’t ideal, of course, to think of the poor animals fenced in like that, but he comforts himself that at least they were petting zoo animals and not yet destined for the butcher. 

How cruel we are, us humans. Living on the dead flesh of others, clothed in their skin and fur. Parasites. 

There’s no farmer’s market today. He takes a break and lounges on a bench, letting his bag of grocery rest against his legs as he tilts his head toward the endless blue sky. Summer in New England is glorious and ephemeral, as beautiful things often are. The sun glosses over his face and lends an illusion of warmth to his pallid complexion. He sighs, closing his eyes and letting the straps of his glasses trail, cool metal against his cheeks. He knows he will pay for it later, this indulgence in the sun. 

The park is strewn with the laughter of children, running and playing in the sandbox beneath their parents’ watchful eyes. He feels a familiar wave of anger splashing up against the dam constructed by his drugs. _How nice it must be to live in lies and fully believe in them,_ he thinks. Once upon a time, he, too, believed in the lies.

That’s not quite true. Even now, he still lets himself believe. Once upon a time, his father loved him. He remembers the warm embraces, the long walks in the English moors, and the way Father would throw him up in the sky and catch him every time. He remembers the sickly child he was, coughing into Father’s chest, soothed in turn by warm, gentle hands. He remembers his mother’s shuttered eyes and thinks that she must have been merely envious of the love that he and Father shared. 

He clutches at the black iron crucifix against his chest, wincing when the wounds on his knuckle split open again. The rest, he has chosen to forget.

* * *

They have a new case. This isn’t an unusual occurrence; in the beginning, he had been excited for the appearance of a patient’s chart on House’s white board, which usually means a new set of clues that he could obsessively arrange and rearrange into some sort of coherence. But all things have their honeymoon phases, even jobs. Even jobs under House.

“Chase, think you can brief Princess Albino over there while I finish this episode?” House yells across their shared space, bouncing some god-forsaken plastic toy at the wall. “Perry’s about to kick some ass.”

He’s explained it before. He’s not an albino; his hair has just gone prematurely gray from a potent combination of wonky genetics and medical school stress. The other members of the team—Chase, Foreman, Cameron, and especially Cuddy—all nodded in sympathy. House only laughed and insisted that he was hiding his special heritage. Go figured.

“Eternal youth,” Chase calls out lazily from behind his coffee mug. “You’re late, Jizabel. Remember coffee duty? I had to make my own this morning.”

“It’s a skill everyone should have. You could use the practice,” he shoots back, stashing his lunchbox in the communal fridge. “What did you say it was?”

“Get this. Thirty-five years old, male, Caucasian patient. But physiologically?” Chase pauses for dramatic effect. “He’s twelve. Physiologically twelve. All the markers say so. It’s not just that he never went through puberty, but he _hasn’t aged at all_.” Chase’s eyes sparkle with excitement, proud to reveal the medical mystery of the week.

Jizabel must admit to being moderately intrigued. “I don’t think we can treat that, in any case. Doesn’t sound fatal.” 

“Actually, we think this may be a better case for Grey-Sloan, in Seattle. We’re a diagnostic department. We’re not in the business of innovating new treatment techniques,” Chase shrugs. “But still, I think this is something you would be interested in.”

Jizabel tilts his head a little and readjusts his glasses. “And why is that?”

“He’s looking for a brain transplant.”

* * *

Jizabel knows that, for all of his self-deprecation, he is an immensely talented surgeon. He thinks that life would be infinitely easier if he had selected pathology for his residency, as the dead don’t talk back, and a soulless body is as docile as any animal he had ever loved. He only selected surgery because of his father’s insistence and his father’s needs. And now his father is gone, and he is stuck on a path that he never wanted for himself.

He never expected to care for any of his patients. Truth be told, he really thinks he should have gone into veterinary medicine, even more so than pathology, but the prestige of medical school and the thought of his father’s approval had never allowed him to take that path either. 

He suspects that is why House and he get along so well; neither of them particularly cares for the well-being of the patients apart from the challenge they represent. He’s often wondered if it makes him a better doctor, that detachment. He imagines operating on a dying dog and the feelings that such a situation would elicit, and he’s glad for his choices. He knows the whispers behind his back, about how cold he is, how cruel. Never crass, not like House, but heartless, unlike House. Ruthlessly efficient, but there it is—efficient. He’s still employed, after all.

At least this way, things aren’t personal.

He’s very, very good with transplants. He completed his residency at Grey-Sloan Memorial, where organ transplants reached new heights. He knows that he is exceptionally gifted with a scalpel, but a brain transplant is but science fiction. 

“Before you say no,” House chimes in, “I think it can be done. I don’t know. Probably. Just do some lit review, OK? Let me know what you think later today.” 

He sighs. He already knows the answers he will find, but there is very little utility in saying no to House. 

* * *

He thinks he has seen this child before. He isn’t sure. Children all look the same, and he regards them with the same casual disdain he shows quite literally everyone else. 

Knowing what he knows, however, this child merits greater attention. Dark hair, dark green eyes, an olive complexion that suggests a warmer place of origin than chilly New England. Striking features in a child, with a sharpness to his eyes that belies years of experience in dealing with the inconveniences of adult life. Jizabel is moderately intrigued.

The team crowds around the hospital bed, which seems just a tad quaint. It is quite clear that the child is rather hale and hearty and is fully capable of supporting himself sans pillows. He is clad in a standard hospital gown, and what little visible of his body is well defined, strong. It is not an unusual look for an especially athletic gymnast wunderkind. 

“Team, this is Cassian,” House booms, straddling that quite wide divide between false exuberance and boredom. “Cassian, team.” 

“Just Cassian, no last name,” Cassian adds.

Cameron juts out her hand, and Cassian takes it. The team makes quiet, polite introductions. Jizabel follows after the rest, taking in Cassian’s warm, surprisingly strong grip. There are scars, light and scattered, across the knuckles, thin spiderwebs. Jizabel averts his eyes and draws back his hand. The warmth remains. 

“I still don’t know what we can offer,” Chase protests. “We deal in diagnostics. This doesn’t seem to be much of a medical mystery. A kind of genetic mutation, surely, and one that does not seem to pose health problems for you, Cassian.” He directs the last sentence at the patient, nodding in acknowledgement and undelivered confirmation. “I still think you’d be much better served at Grey-Sloan in Seattle.” 

Cassian’s voice is light, a little lilting. A boy still. “I have full faith in Dr. House and his team. I’ve done my research.” A hint of cockney in his accent, a curiosity in this Yankee land. Jizabel files it away for later. “I want my transplant here. If it can be done at all, it will be done here.”

House lifts an eyebrow and twirls his cane. “You hear him, boys and girls. Get to work.”

* * *

The bloodwork is monotonous, and really, he could have delegated the task to a nurse, who would then transport the samples to the lab to a technician. His time can be better spent, and he is indeed spoiled with the luxury of choice. 

The rest of the team has long departed for clinic duty, a chore he is only glad to escape. He thinks of the surgery to come, itching for the feel of the scalpel gliding into flesh. He yearns for the powerful assault of iron in his nose, overpowering even the antiseptic. The warmth, however fleeting, of fresh blood beneath his nitrile gloves. Anatomy lab was always his favorite, but the cadavers don’t bleed, and their flesh is cold. 

“What kind of work did you do, Cassian? Before coming here?” It is rare for him to take such interest in another person, but he must admit, he is intrigued. For all of his limitless imagination, it is difficult to envision what someone with such a strange genetic condition could do in the world. Cassian does not appear especially well-educated, despite his pleasant wit. A white-collar position seems out of place, somehow, with those roughened hands and scarred knuckles and leathery skins at the joints. Menial work, perhaps, but even the appearance of child labor should suffice to deter potential employers of taking the risk. 

He puts the cap on the fourth vial, gives it a secure twist, and packs it next to its brethren on his tray. Cassian’s blood is viscous, but not abnormally so. The sheen is bright and well-oxygenated, and he imagines his own thin blood in hundreds of vials scattered around him. An empty room, filled with scattered vials, his body a hollow husk in its center. 

Cassian shifts, shuffling his limbs under him on the bed. The man has shown no fear as he watches the needle disappear in and out of his skin, his veins. “Odd jobs, here and there. A circus, once. I did… gymnastics.” 

Jizabel smiles. “Are you particularly flexible, then?” He realizes, belatedly, that it sounds as if he is flirting. Preposterous. His smile widens.

Cassian grins. “You’d like to find out, Doctor?”

“Perhaps you’d show me one day, your talent,” he says, all too aware of the inappropriateness of this conversation, marked more so by the sparkling mirth in the eyes of the apparent child before him. A handsome child. A man, grown. And yet. 

“Certainly. After my transplant, I promise you.” 

The transplant. He doesn’t know yet if it is even possible, but many things were impossible, until they are.He almost likes being in Cassian’s company, as far as human company goes. The atmosphere between them is… not completely intolerable. Unburdened. It is not that Cassian is particularly witty or interesting beyond the average man, but he _is_. There is something familiar about the locks of hair falling across Cassian’s eyes, the tightness of his expressions, sometimes, when Cassian is uncomfortable and unaware of how he looks. Jizabel feels as if he knows how Cassian’s fingers would feel, as if he can trace the whorls of Cassian’s prints. He does not know why this is so. Cassian is the personification of déjà-vu, and Jizabel does not know how to behave toward a ghost.


	2. noise from a sunless world

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is some DUBIOUS CONSENT in this chapter.
> 
> I work in mental health, and I definitely think Jizabel is diagnosable on both Axis I and II, if we're going by the DSM-IV. But I won't share what I think the diagnoses are because stigma. We're going with it's-something-pretty-severe for this story, but I think we can kind of guess.
> 
> For goodness' sake, please heed the tags. There is a ton of really triggering stuff in this story.

It is not the first time he comes undone, but it is the first time that it has happened at work. 

He would be lying if he says there has been no warning signs. The intrusive thoughts, the images. The warmth rising up his neck to his ears. The restlessness, the sleeplessness. The intense lust for blood—his own, others’, it matters not. He did ace his psychiatry rotation back in medical school, and he knows his _condition_ defies true diagnosis. At best, they can slap on an NOS—Not Otherwise Specified at the end. 

For him, it is merely an amalgamation of everything that is wrong with his life, every reason for atonement. Every justification for the lashes on his back. 

He knows what to do when it happens. It is easy enough to find an empty room on an empty floor, and the morgue usually suffices. It is cold there, and that, somehow, gives him comfort. He melds into the background, and the ice in his blood matches the cold tile, the unforgiving stainless steel. All around him, bodies without blood. 

He wonders if his own blood, spilled, can warm up their skin. 

The scalpel in his pocket is colder than his own skin, its edge protected by a thin plastic cap. He holds it up to the bright fluorescent light of the morgue, examines it as it catches the sharpness of white. He hears nothing, but there is an urge within him to hear something, feel something, for red to invade his vision amidst the whites and grays in the room. The pathologists have gone home for the day. It is night. 

His hands are steady as he uncaps the scalpel. It is an extraordinary tool. Light, thin as a breath, and sharper than the scolding voice of a schoolmistress. He wonders, if the scalpel were made thin enough, if one could feel it as it glides ever so gently into the membrane of an eye. 

He catches his finger on the blade. Not on his dominant hand. He has a surgery to perform soon. The blood wells up almost immediately, fat and glistening. It tastes sharp in his mouth, like the scalpel itself, and he closes his eyes. He can see the red in the blackness behind his eyelids. He notices, with a desperate attempt to contain his mirth, that this has been the first animal product he has consumed since that summer so long ago.

“Dr. Disraeli?” 

The scalpel slides from his grasp and slices the meat of his palm. A thin line of red. He turns his head, heedless of the blood dripping onto his white coat, and sees a child in white. Cassian.

“Dr. Disraeli, are you-,” he starts and cuts himself off, “ You’re hurt.” 

Jizabel hums. So he is. He squeezes his palm, curling his fingers into a loose fist. The cut is too thin to bleed much, but he does notice, pleasantly, the sharp sting of pain. It is the little wounds that hurt the most, that catch you off-guard.

“My apologies,” he murmurs, turning to flash a brilliant smile at Cassian. He doesn’t know how the man-child-man has managed to enter the morgue, but he does not care to ask. Far be it from him to chastise someone for being where they should not be. 

“Can I help you? Should I call someone?” Cassian, to his credit, has a very stable voice. If Jizabel doesn’t know any better, he may even say that Cassian is very calm about this whole situation.

“No need. I just need a moment.” He straightens his legs and leans against the stainless steel drawer, feeling phantom hands carding through his hair, unbound. “Why are you here, Cassian? You should be in your room.” They’re monitoring him, for the next few days. The bloodwork is repeated daily, just to be sure. Cassian is a remarkably healthy individual. The only challenge that remains is to find a donor, and Jizabel’s blade will finish the work. 

He feels it, the calm before the storm. He knows just enough to understand that no one should bear witness to this.

Struggling to his feet, scalpel in hand, with blood splattered on his coat, he must make quite a frightening vision. Cassian’s lips are pinched, his expression tight and disapproving. The sternness on that youthful face is an incongruous sight, and Jizabel laughs, the sound a little too loud in so stark a room. “I do apologize. I’m, ah, a little tired. I’ll be going home. I trust you’ll find your way back safely.” 

He feels the force of that gaze follow him out of the morgue. He notices the distinct lack of click-clacking behind him; Cassian must have decided to keep his distance. He walks straight home without his bag, through the empty hallways and out the main door, through the empty streets and coolness of the night, and finally finds himself in his own bathroom. A specter in the mirror, a bloody hand and a bloodier coat. His hair is in total disarray, for his hair tie has slipped off at some point during the day. The lines on his face seem etched more deeply, the darkness under his eyes blooming like bruises. Gaunt features, with skin and hair bleached of all colors. He looks breakable, hollow, a ragdoll built of nothing but breaths and nails. 

The cut on his palm has already clotted over. He pulls his fist back and slams it, full force, at the mirror. It cracks. He is triumphant, and the lines of blood bloom, too, on formerly unbroken skin. The blood is cool, but he feels warmed, and the iron smell is strong, and he feels, against all reasons, that this is the only real thing he knows.

* * *

The next day, he sports a splint on his left hand, which is also neatly covered in white gauze. He tells alarmed onlookers, a gaggle of nurses, that it was an accident with a particularly fragile wine glass at the bar. He smiles and thanks them for their concern. At least one delicate bone in the arch of his knuckle is fractured, and when nobody is looking, he presses on it quite deliberately with his other hand, savoring the jolt of sensation. 

Cassian’s room is cold, like the rest of the hospital. It seems to be a mission of the hospital to make absolutely no one happy with the settings of its central thermostat. Cassian is curled up in an armchair, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a furling cape. A tattered copy of Harry Potter rests on his lap, folded back on itself and kept in place by Cassian’s small fingers. He springs into action the moment Jizabel enters the room.

“Dr. Disraeli,” he starts, flinging the book aside. 

Jizabel sets down the tray of vials and needles, and he leans down to pick up the discarded volume. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Arguably, the worst of them. “You’re going to lose your place,” he says. He looks around for something to use as a bookmark, finding nothing, and sets it face-down, tented. It is practically a sin to crease a book in such a way, and he feels a rising surge of anger toward Cassian for his carelessness. 

Cassian, at least, has the nerve to look vaguely apologetic. “About yesterday… I wasn’t following you. I just wanted to explore. I’ve been stuck here for days.” He shrugs, gesturing around the sterile, austere room. “It gets boring in this room.”

It is true that Cassian has had no visitors since he has arrived. Jizabel has wondered about that, too.

“So, Cassian, no last name?” 

“No last name,” Cassian says, his tone very firm and plain that he will entertain no further questions in this vein. “Whatever it is that’s going on with you, are you ok now?” 

What a sweet thing to ask. Jizabel is almost touched and may have applauded the distraction if he were not at its expense. “I’m fine, thanks.”

“I really wasn’t trying to spy on you.”

Once upon a time, Jizabel would have been concerned about spies and being followed. But that feeling hasn’t surfaced in a long time now, not since he came to America. Here, he is safe. Now that Father is dead. 

He would give anything to have that not be true. 

* * *

It has been an uneventful few weeks. They are trying novel treatments, starting with the least invasive ones possible. Against all wishes of the patient, they are trying to reinvent medical science. Chase is under the illusion that there must be something they can do, short of peeling back the skin of Cassian’s skull, taking a saw and breaking the bones open, clawing at the soft, gelatinous substance inside, and scooping it into a brand new body. And, for some reasons, House is humoring this foolery. Nothing has been successful, so far, but nothing has made Cassian especially sick, and so they proceed. 

“Doctor, I have something to confess.” 

Weak autumn sunlight illuminates the hospital room, and it is unseasonably warm outside. Earlier, Jizabel had cracked open a window to let the heat in. The hospital is always cooled to an unreasonable American standard, and he finds himself longing for the bite of true English wind and rain instead of this pale imitation.

Cassian perches on the ledge of the windowsill, his slight frame hanging haphazardly on the narrow surface. Even in his hospital gown, even in his stunted body, he still manages to exude a certain kind of intimidation. His eyes are dark and intense, his gaze firm, and Jizabel blinks.

“What is it, Cassian?” Jizabel asks, adjusting the valves on the IV drip. _I’m not your priest,_ he thinks, but knowledge is indeed power _._ He still finds it difficult to reconcile Cassian’s medical condition with his childish appearance, compounded by a most incongruous demeanor. If Cassian were dead, he would not be a poltergeist, Jizabel has decided, but he hopes that would be the case. He imagines the scenario and finds it most amusing, the thought of serious Cassian hurtling objects through the air with unbridled glee.

“Delilah. You know it.”

Jizabel prides himself on his impeccable control, and his ministration does not cease even as he hears the slightest catch in his voice as he responds. “The Biblical woman? Samson and Delilah? What about her?”

Cassian sighs. “Drop the crap, Doctor. You know exactly what I meant.”

He does. He does not know how _Cassian_ does. 

“Promise me you won’t be upset,” Cassian warns, hopping off the windowsill and taking a step closer to Jizabel. Jizabel maneuvers the IV stand between them, his grip on the control valve tightening. “They didn’t send me—I came on my own. But, well, the fact that I mentioned the name at all makes it already suspicious, right?”

He feels all oxygen burst into flame out of the air. He sees it out of the corner of his eye. In the space in front of Cassian’s frowning face, fairy spots dance and twinkle merrily. Menacingly. He knows just how quickly things can go south and just how often they do so. “I really have no idea what you’re talking about, Cassian. Get some rest. I’ll come back to check on you later.” 

Cassian’s hand clamps over his wrist, and his mind goes blank. He feels perfectly calm. It is as if something deep inside him has frozen over, and the low burn of cold hatred sluggishly makes its way through his veins, arteries, and capillaries. The three main types of blood vessels in the human body. He hears his voice smooth out like fresh spun silk, and he leans into Cassian’s grip, deliberately letting his tall frame shadow over Cassian’s tiny body. “Cassian, please unhand me,” he says pleasantly, one hand slipping into his coat pocket and fingering the smooth cap of the scalpel within. He can be quick. He knows just where to aim and how quickly Cassian can exsanguinate. He hasn’t yet considered how to frame the whole incident as accidental, but that, too, will come to him.

“Listen, Doctor, I’m serious. Ok, I’ll admit—I was sent by them at first. To… keep track of you, in a way. Back in London. But when your father died, the whole organization crumbled, and Delilah was no more. I didn’t know what to do or where to go, so I followed you, my last assignment. But I built a kind of life here, now. Look, it took me a while to decide to seek you out specifically for help, but I’m being honest here. I just want to be cured. I didn’t want you to find out later and think-”

Jizabel jerks away. The mention of his father, even in passing, is scalding pain. To hear it coming out of Cassian’s mouth is the equivalent of soaking a third degree burn in sulfuric acid.

To know that his patient is a spy is—, well, unsurprising. His father does have a way of being everywhere, even in death. The predictability is soothing, even now.

“Doctor, please. I know this sounds crazy. I know you have no reason to trust me, but please, I could have kept quiet about this, but I decided to tell you, alright? I wouldn’t have done it if I had bad intentions toward you.” 

He checks the dosage in the IV drip again. He double checks Cassian’s notes for the day. 

“Everything is in order, Cassian,” he intones. “I have another patient to see to. If you need anything, you know how to get ahold of the nurse.”

“Doctor, please, just listen-”

“Have a nice day, Cassian.” His smile is achingly cold, brittle, the barest sheen of ice over a murky pond. 

He leaves.

* * *

It takes him three days to be back in Cassian’s company. The rage has been witnessed only by every breakable object in his apartment. He does not know what is stopping him from injecting an air bubble into Cassian's IV line, but he has not completely ruled out this course of action. 

“I know you can’t really trust me, Doctor,” Cassian says quietly. 

They are in Cassian’s hospital room. House has decided on a trial of extreme hormone replacement therapy, modified with CRISPR to specifically target Cassian’s growth genes. It isn’t painful, and that may be the best thing Jizabel can say about it. The last ditch effort before a brain transplant, if they can find a donor. Cassian is forced into this prolonged hospital stay for the mere fancy of a madman, but he isn’t complaining as much as Jizabel expects.

“Do you really expect me to be able to?” Jizabel asks, checking over Cassian’s charts. No change.

Cassian sighs and dangles his legs over the edge of the bed, his polka-dotted hospital gown swaying with each movement. “I know it’s a lot to ask. I wish the circumstances had been better. Maybe we could have been friends, even.”

Jizabel highly doubts that. He stares at Cassian’s youthful face, aged only by the frown he always wears when he looks at Jizabel. “I don’t know why you would bother with wanting me to trust you.” 

“I just think we have more in common than you think,” Cassian says, his gaze firm and unflinching. Jizabel must admit that he is impressed. Not many people can keep eye contact with him for very long. Something about him is so off-putting that they avert their eyes almost instantaneously. 

Jizabel smiles. “I think you’d better start telling me the whole story then, Cassian.” 

* * *

The transplant will work. He doesn’t know how this knowledge comes to him. Nothing in the medical literature has suggested that it could, but failures are often unrecorded. There may have been attempts with slight errors. Jizabel does not err. 

He sees the network of neurons stretch out overhead, like a thick forest canopy connecting faraway stars. He sees the flashes of synapses firing, the blood vessels digging deep roots into the crevices of white matter, the sulci and gyri making up the topography of the human brain. He sees Cassian’s brain in his hands, cradled ever so gently, the cup of his palms the only shape for the gelatinous mass to settle into. He sees it suspended in formalin, turning grayer and whiter and more solid, the translucent jelly settling into form. He sees green eyes swimming in the jar, the optic nerves still connected to the brain mass. They blink at him. 

The transplant will work. And, if it doesn’t, Cassian will make a wonderful specimen for his collection. It is child’s play to play the thief amidst people who do not care to see. 

* * *

If Jizabel had friends, he may have considered calling Cassian a closer acquaintance, which is, frankly, a rather silly notion to begin with. It is something he no longer considers. The betrayal still stings. He can’t quite articulate how he has been betrayed by someone he just met, someone who has given him no reasons to trust at all. But still. The illogicality of human nature has always made itself quite apparent to Jizabel. It is one reason he never wanted to enter psychiatry; his patients made far too much sense that he could not, in good conscience and science, deem them ill. 

He’s heard the story. He thinks it is a rather unsatisfactory story. He does not know how much he believes Cassian, who claims to have been employed briefly by Delilah as a _procurement specialist_ , which may just be a nice way of saying he collects bodies for Delilah’s scientific experiments. He was working out of their headquarter in London, which is apparently where he was from. That, at least, checks out, with the accent. 

“What about that circus story?” Jizabel has asked.

“All of that is true, as well. I have never lied to you.” 

“But a lie by omission is still a lie.” Father had made sure he learned that lesson. Jizabel has always been a very good student.

“Yeah, I know, sorry.”

As expected, there has been a fair amount of spying and stalking. Cassian, allegedly, was tasked to follow several targets to America and report on their movement. Jizabel is one such honored target. 

“I swear to you, I never reported back on you, not for anything that mattered,” Cassian protests. 

He does not believe this lying little boy.

Jizabel stares down at him, his glasses slipping a little down his nose, and he is sure he has taken on the look of an especially disapproving, murderous bird. “I don’t trust you at all. I’m sure you know that. But while you are here, you are my patient, and I am duty-bound to treat you. That is the extent of this. We will never speak of Delilah again, do you understand?” 

“I know he beat you. Before. When you were younger. I was there.”

The silence grows so loud that it is all Jizabel can hear. “Beg pardon?” 

“The Cardmaster. You keep forgetting I am a lot older than you, don’t you? I’ve been working for Delilah for a long time. Everyone knew what went on behind those doors at night. You, and your brother. We could tell what was happening to whom, you know? Cain was the loud one. And you,” he pauses, hesitant to continue, and apparently deciding against caution, “you never made a sound. All we could hear was the whip.” 

_And you never did a thing about it._

“It wasn’t right. I knew it wasn’t right, but what could I do? It was all about survival for me. It still is, really. But I am sorry for that. I could have at least tried to do… something, I guess. I don’t know. It’s partly why I never told him about anything that you were doing.”

What he was doing. Highly illegal human experimentations. He had little scruples, it was true, and likely still has none. Whatever Father demanded, he performed. Old men, young men, little girls. It mattered not. There was no line he would not cross for his father. 

But there were, too, times he had disobeyed, mostly where Cain was involved.“I know this doesn’t help. None of this helps. I just want you to know that I didn’t do what I should have done before, but I am going to do it. Earn your trust. It never sat right with me, what he did. At the circus, they beat me, too. I know what it was like.”

The impudence. “You don’t,” Jizabel whispers. How can he claim to know what it was like when he was never Jizabel, when the hand holding that whip was never his father. “We are not here to compare scars.” 

“And yet, I am showing you all of mine,” Cassian retorts, defiant. “You are helping me. Let me help you. Let me make it right.” 

“You can’t.” 

“I think it’s pretty obvious even to someone like me that you’re far from fine,” Cassian continues, hands on his hip. “Sooner or later, you won’t be able to bear it by yourself anymore. Let me help you.” 

_No. No._

“We will never speak of this again,” he repeats, his voice shaking, and, with a final glance backward at the small body on the bed, he leaves, feeling eyes boring into him as he speeds through the hospital hallway.

He’s always running away from Cassian, it seems.

* * *

Cassian has a talent for finding him where he never wants to be found.

He has been shakier, recently. His drug cocktail hits his kidneys something awful. His hands tremble sometimes when he simply wants to cradle a warm cup of coffee. Things slip from his grasp, which, to his chagrin, do not discriminate well between mundane, easily replaceable things, and potential biohazards. The last time he dropped a vial of Cassian’s blood, it had splattered everywhere on the floor and all over his shoes. The spare pair he stashed in the locker room came in handy, but he didn’t know whether or not he should toss the ruined pair into the trash or not. He stuffed it into his locker, wrapped in a plastic bag, and decided to think about it some more. It has been days, and the bag of bloody shoes still sits there, in his locker. 

He is in a supply closet on the third floor, which is an endroit he has found himself in increasingly often these past weeks. The hours grow late, and his shift has long ended, but he can’t bring himself to go home just yet. His head spins. He has not been eating much lately, which is not exactly unusual, but it may have something to do with the perpetual knot he feels in his stomach and the coldness that spreads through his extremities. He does not feel the gnaw of hunger and likely never truly has. It is a duty that he has since abandoned. 

So he likes to just sit in the supply closet, sometimes, nestled between the mop bucket and the broomstick, view hidden from the door by a shelf of disinfectants. The antiseptic smell is strongest here, in the whole hospital. It blocks the smell of blood that follows him relentlessly, and it is here that he is able to take his short, shallow breaths undisturbed. 

Which is why he feels very much disturbed when the door cracks open, and Cassian’s dark head pokes in, dragging an IV pole behind him.

“Doctor,” he says, pointedly not raising his voice at the end. It is not a question. He knows Jizabel is here.

“Cassian.” _You found me. You_ are _good at your job._

The other man comes closer, clumsily navigating the labyrinth of shelves with his IV pole. He looks a little paler today, Jizabel notices, and makes a note to write that down in his progress notes. The combination of drugs and hormones coursing through his system should indeed sicken any reasonably healthy adult, and yet Cassian is still almost as robust as his first day at the hospital. It seems almost a shame to try and find a cure for invincibility. 

“Mind if I sit with you?”

“I do mind, but you will do it anyway,” Jizabel mutters, rubbing his eyes. His glasses have fallen to his chest, dangling by the metal beads. The world is a little hazier, a little softer. Cassian’s face is a little blurry, but his stare is sharp, and that, Jizabel can see, even with myopia.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

Cassian scoffs. “Anyone with eyes can tell you’ve been ill, walking around looking like death. Shit, I didn’t mean-”

“It doesn’t matter.” Death. He hasn’t been called that in a long time. The name should have sent him into a fit, but he feels very little right now. If anything, it is a much-needed jolt of attention.

“Sorry. I just meant you don’t look good.” 

“Thanks.” 

“Not like that. I mean-”

“It’s fine.” 

They sit in silence, and it is anything but comfortable. 

He feels sick. Not the way Cassian means, but he feels nausea rising in his throat. He knows it is a phantom urge. He can only bring up bile. There is, quite simply, nothing else to bring up. 

Cassian’s hand is on his forehead. “You don’t have a temperature,” the other man notes. “That’s good, at least. Right?”

“I told you I’m not sick. And that’s not a proper way to take temperature. It’s very inaccurate.” 

“I guess you are the doctor here. Which just makes me wonder how you can take such poor care of yourself.” 

A scolding from his patient. He really must look awful. Starvation can do that to a man.

Cassian slides a hand into the pocket of his hospital gown and withdraws a candy bar. Twix, Jizabel thinks. Trust a grown man to have the taste buds of a child.

“You should eat something,” Cassian suggests, holding out the bar as a peace offering.

Jizabel sighs. “No.” After a moment, he adds, “thanks,” begrudgingly. He is supposed to have manners.

“Split?” Cassian offers, hopeful.

“No,” Jizabel repeats, firmer this time. “You think I’d get better from being loaded with sugar?”

“It’s just a small bar,” Cassian mutters, unwrapping the bar with a swift movement of his wrists. “I’ll stop bothering you if you take a bite. How’s that for a deal?”

“I am not a child to be bargained with,” Jizabel retorts, disbelieving. He does not know why he is humoring this conversation. Cassian should be in his room, not in a supply closet in the middle of the night. How does this man always manage to follow him? A lifetime of constant vigilance, and he has been slipping of late.

Cassian holds up a placating hand. “Alright, alright,” he says, breaking the twin Twix apart and taking one to his mouth. The smell of artificial, processed chocolate is overpowering. Jizabel wants to hurl. He may have made a sound akin to that. 

Cassian’s eyes grow wide. “Oh god, are you alright? Sorry, I’ll put it away. Didn’t mean to make it worse. I just thought you could use some food.”

“I’m fine,” Jizabel insists. He fights the urge to hold a hand over his mouth. It will pass, and soon. At the very least, Cassian wasn’t as stupid as to bring meat.

“You really look like you haven’t eaten in a while.”

“Why does that concern you?” Jizabel snaps, a little of his cold fire back.

Cassian shrugs. The candy bar is nowhere to be seen. “I’m worried.”

“About me. Your doctor."

“Yeah. After what we talked about the other day. It hasn’t been sitting right with me. I don’t think it sat right with you, either.” 

“It doesn’t matter.” 

“You keep saying that. Nothing seems to matter to you, does it?”

“Isn’t that the same with everyone?”

“No.” The vehemence in Cassian’s voice takes him by surprise. “There are things that should matter. You should matter.”

 _I don’t_ , he thinks helplessly. _Neither do you, but you just don’t know it._

“You do matter,” Cassian insists. 

He is too tired to disagree. It would be a losing battle, anyway. Letting Cassian believe it does neither of them any harm. He will always know the truth.

At least, with Cassian in the room, the air is marginally warmer.

* * *

He is tired. Lethargy drags him under, and he wants to let it. One of the reasons he decided to transition out of surgery—there is very little that can capture his interest enough to sustain him through all those long hours on his feet, constantly fighting fatigue, fighting the urge to slip and fall and never resurface.

He thinks he is good enough at hiding it. His colleagues know to give him a wide berth even on his best days, and lately, he hasn’t had too many of those. They are only too happy to leave him to his own device, and these days, it means checking up on Cassian. Who, apparently, is a very perceptive man. He thinks it must be a result of all those long hours of stalking and spying. 

“Why do you take those pills if they make you like this?” Cassian asks, his voice a soothing current that Jizabel thinks he can fall asleep to. He must not have been careful enough. He has been seen with his medications. He wonders just how far the extent of the spying goes. He thinks about the rankings of Delilah and wonders where Cassian placed within the hierarchy. He had been Death. Has been. Is. 

Death’s dominion is vast, and all submits to him. He has held such power. Neither judge, jury, nor executioner. He simply absorbed them all into his fold. He gave them all a home, a place to belong. A purpose to serve. 

He takes a moment to think and braces himself, his knuckles dead white on the rusty railing. When did they climb up the fire escape? “Not wanting to live and wanting to die are rather different things,” he says quietly, eyes distant, and he almost hopes that Cassian won’t turn away. 

Cassian only nods, thoughtful and solemn, the expression so out of place on his youthful face. “In either case, I would miss you.” 

A small, scarred hand covers Jizabel’s own, and Jizabel swallows heavily. _You don’t know me. You know only the beaten child. You have no idea what I have become._

The warmth and solid heft of Cassian’s hand on his is too much to resist. Human nature, creature comfort. He stays.

“I believe you,” he says, but he doesn’t. He wants to say so much more, but he won’t let himself. Cassian’s eyes are bright and solemnly earnest, two torches of green outshining the sun at dusk, and Jizabel knows that he doesn’t need to say anything else. All of this can only be lies, but he is a master of sustaining himself on lies alone.

A gentle squeeze to the hand. Another squeeze in reply, and for now, that is quite enough.

* * *

He likes the garden. The apartment complex looks over a beautiful lake that sparkles in the summer, and on its shore lies a flower garden that Mrs. Gladstone touts as her most noteworthy accomplishment. 

It’s winter now, and the water stills, heavy and frigid and dark with hopelessness. Such is December in Providence. The flowers have long disappeared, leaving behind bare branches on the perennials, and all the annuals have already been reduced to gray mush. The birds are gone, too, this icy land the very impetus to driving them south.

Still, he likes sitting alone under the ornate gas lamp and pretending that he has parsed the rift in time and space to the London of the 19th century. Surely things were easier back then, he reasons. Simpler. He would have been locked into a madhouse and never released. People like him shouldn’t be allowed in society, anyway, and all this medical technology has only prevented him from seeking sweet oblivion in his own madness.

He has been gradually decreasing his intake of the maintenance medications. He is quite fully aware of the consequences of his actions, but the temptation is too great to resist—without the fog in his mind, he lives. He can feel, and he almost revels in the extremes of his emotions that have long evaded him, suppressed by constant dosages of whatever else is in his drug cocktail. The drugs flatten his affect, and he drifts through the day in a haze, functional with a void where his rage used to be. At least this way, his lucid moments are worth living. He thinks of Cassian’s boyish smile and their now uneasy but constant rapport, and he allows himself to hope that for once, he isn’t wrong about where to place his trust, however tentatively.

He doesn’t know, really. Sometimes he changes his mind about the merits of medications. But right now, he has decided unanimously among the various metaphorical voices in his head that he can go without. The tapering process takes a while, and he knows what lies ahead.

It is probably a testament to his insanity that he’s decided to go through with it, with all of his medical knowledge at hand, but he wants to trust, goddamnit, and he thinks he can see it within his grasp. He just needs to take away the dam.

House doesn’t know. No one on the team knows because it’s none of their business. He feels as if House will laugh in his face, that drug addict. He imagines that he would become addicted to drugs, too, if his drugs were half as pleasant as Vicodin.

It hasn’t affected him so far, but then again, he has only started going off the meds two weeks ago. He’s still good and useful at work, and better even, able to throw out diagnoses that are usually met with derision, but at least they help House in the man’s thought process. With Cassian their major project at the moment, he feels compelled to give it his all. Cassian, who is still in the hospital, prodded and pierced and drugged. Who, impervious, defies all.

And he feels better, too, physically. The fatigue, the lack of appetite, the nausea—gone. The kidney damage is not irreversible, not yet, and this way, he is taking care of his health, isn’t he? He still barely eats, but he is taking in enough to function. His complexion has brightened considerably, and he no longer carries that starved, scarecrow look of the last few months. His vanity considers it an accomplishment. 

_My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains_

_My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,_

_Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains_

Keats had the right idea. Hemlock he may have trouble obtaining, but opiates are bountiful. He knows where House stashes his load. 

It would be so easy.

He doesn’t know what stilled his hand, but he shoves the palmful of pills into the pocket of his lab coat and heaves into the toilet, resting his cheek against the cool porcelain, and sighs.

* * *

He has never had a clear concept of time. The days always blur, on and off the medications. It is as if his body exists in the present moment, but his mind is years behind, sluggishly keeping up through blindfolds and earplugs. He is a frightened child. He is a sickly child. He is a child strapped to a bed, chest flayed open, stuffed with things that do not belong to him. Organs and flesh. 

_What are little boys made of?_

He’s in the garden again. The sky overhead twinkles with dim lights, and he is having trouble distinguishing the beauty of stars from the cruel flashes of man made flying machines. He yearns for the true darkness of the night sky, but he hasn’t seen a dark sky in years. 

New England brims with light, even in darkness. _We have ruined even this,_ he thinks bitterly and takes another swig from the bottle. He doesn’t even taste the wine anymore, which, he supposes, is a waste of a twenty dollars bottle. He’s been drinking a lot more lately, a bad sign, and he’s been here before.

_Snips and snails, and puppy dog tails. And their sisters._

“How long will you keep pretending that you don’t want this?” Cassandra’s voice is slick, almost oily with insinuation. Jizabel doesn’t know when the older man came to the garden without his knowing, but then again, he wasn’t paying attention. “I’ve been so very patient, Jizabel, but it hurts me to see you delude yourself into not wanting what could be.”

Maybe he does. Does he? Nothing makes much sense anymore, and he is so cold. He’s always so cold these days. Cassandra smiles winsomely at him, and he must admit that the other man is attractive, if somewhat in a rakish, fuckboy way. He swallows hard and turns away, arms crossed in front of his chest almost protectively.

“A toast,” Cassandra proposes, lifting up a bottle of his own. “To your astonishing beauty.” He snorts and against his best judgment raises his bottle in response. He hasn’t eaten in a while, aside from the wine, he thinks, and his mind is liquid. It takes thoughts a long time to break through to the surface, but he manages, and he thinks that maybe Cassandra has the right idea. Alcohol is always the right idea.

He is already finished with his wine. Cassandra hands over his own bottle, still almost completely full, and Jizabel takes a long swig, letting the acrid taste wash over his tongue and down his throat. It’s quality wine, which he expects from the hedonist. He takes another swig and hands it back, and Cassandra dismissively shoves it away, eyes intent with heat. 

“What do you say, my dear?” A hand on the small of his back, spreading fire throughout the rest of his body. He’s burning up now. He’s going to sizzle in the cold air. He’s going to melt all the snow. 

Their chests are flushed against each other, Cassandra’s warm, sour breath tickling the tip of his left ear. He hears the blood rushing through his ears, and if he concentrates enough, he can hear Cassandra’s heart bursting in reply. Their mutual arousal is palpable. He can squeeze it between his fingers, until that, too, bursts.

Maybe he can give in to this. Maybe this is what he deserves. The fires of Hell await him and will not relent, and a sinner is already a sinner. Thoughts of Cassian come unbidden. He imagines the boyish face scowling in disapproval at what he’s doing. He wants to say something but finds that he can’t form words, his limbs are loose, and he only knows heat.

When Cassandra pounds into him that night, lecherous hands digging into the old scars on his back, all he can remember thinking is that this is the beginning of the end.

* * *

He wakes up in Cassandra’s bed, covered in Cassandra’s marks, and everything is sticky under the comforter’s oppressive weight. His black cross hangs heavy on his neck, a warm pressure, for once. He thinks that something is off, but his head is pounding something fierce, and he knows that hangovers are bad, but never _this_ bad.

A door opens. “Good morning, _principessa_.” 

He freezes, mind whirring into high alert. 

“I must admit, you were a lot more enthusiastic last night than I had expected,” Cassandra laughs and approaches the bed, bringing with him clouds of warm steam. He is completely undressed, and Jizabel scoots away, struggling to keep his expression neutral. “I always knew there was something between us, but now I know you must really, really like me.”

Jizabel wants to throw up. The stickiness between his legs tells him everything that must have happened last night. “Y-you must have drugged me,” he accuses, hearing the gravel in his throat. “That wine. There’s something in it.”

Cassandra makes a wounded sound. “I would _never_ ,” he snaps. “Why would I need to do that when I can get _anyone_ I want? Don’t go shy on me now. You know what you did last night, you little whore.”

 _I really don’t_ , Jizabel thinks, already playing back the events of the night. It is as if someone had edited out the footage, clumsily leaving scenes that don’t match up, disjointed and blurry. He remembers nothing beyond drinking wine in the garden, Cassandra’s approach, and waking up. And the banter. Perhaps there was banter. He must have blacked out. He must have been drugged. Or maybe Cassandra was telling the truth, and he had willingly spread his thighs like a whore. The pollution of sins doesn’t discriminate, however, and he knows that it is all the same in the eyes of his Maker.

“I need to go now,” he says shakily, gathering his clothes from the floor. Walking hurts. He winces, numbly locating the source of his discomfort. 

Cassandra doesn’t stop him. “You’ll come back,” Cassandra yells mirthfully. He can hear the older man’s laughter as he rushes through the apartment, slamming the door behind him.

 _You little whore,_ he hears his father say _._

 _You little whore,_ agrees Cassian _._

He is always running away these days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you think this whole story is just a thinly plotted excuse for me to rifle through Jizabel's head and make some really painful shit happen, then yes, you are absolutely right.
> 
> PSA, please don't go off your psychotropic medications randomly. Jizabel thinks he's a doctor and can decide this shit on his own, but is Definitely Not Recommended. Please talk to your medical care providers. <3 Also please don't drink alcohol and take antipsychotics. 
> 
> Poem is extracted from John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale because Jizabel is a typical modern emo boy.


	3. yours the whole graveyard of heaven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dubious consent continues. This chapter is long. Jizabel is an unreliable narrator. I need a nap.

It’s been three days. Cassian has been asking about him, he knows, but for some reason he can’t bring himself to face the other man. He tells his team to take over for him. He claims clinic duty. He claims illness. He claims a number of things that aren’t true, and no one has yet called him out for it.

He thinks it may be shame or guilt, but he has always had trouble distinguishing the two. And so he’s locked himself away in his own apartment, pathetic and shaking and basically starving himself. His fridge is empty, but it does not matter for his diet of air and wine.

He’s just glad that he usually buys dead crickets in bulk, and he just restocked last week, so Mikaela—his pet tarantula, the one constant animal companion he allows himself—won’t go hungry any time soon. Mikaela was a rescue in that he _rescued_ her from a neglectful pet store owner, and if he could not return her to her native desert, then he was going to do the next best thing and let her roam free in his home, sharing in his own prison.

The doorbell rings cheerfully. Jizabel stiffens and feels a chill spread down his extremities from his chest even though the heater is on full blast. His mind is going a mile a minute. He does not get visitors. It can’t be Cassian—the man most definitely knows where he lives but is in any case cannot already be discharged. The only other person he can think of who would show up at his doorstep is one best relegated to the shadows of the night, when mistakes are made and sins afforded a cover of deniability.

He considers not answering. He considers locking himself in his bedroom under the cover and immediately dismisses the idea as ludicrous. Far be it from him to let Cassandra have such power over him. He fingers the blade in his trouser pocket, wondering how easy it would be to dissolve Cassandra’s body in his bathtub, perversely taking pleasure in the thought of extinguishing Cassandra’s life on his mother’s property. Perhaps today will be his day, after all. 

Nothing could have prepared him for the mass of blond curls and white lace flying at him with all the speed and enthusiasm of an overly excited golden retriever, and he would have fallen humiliatingly on his ass if he had weighed any less. “Jizabel!” the flying menace screams, and suddenly hands are all over him, and he almost starts to hyperventilate before recognition sets in. Insofar as he knows these hands, this has not been their usual context, but then again, a violation of _usual_ can be excused, just this once, for all the years that stand between their last meeting and this moment.

“Mary,” he murmurs, as if he can’t quite believe in his eyes and ears. His little sister stands before him like a vision, all lovely smiles and beautiful blue eyes and shiny golden hair and absolutely precious in her knee-length white dress, tiny buds of pink roses embroidered on her bust. “I- you’ve grown,” he smiles, the first real smile in days, and it feels good. He is emboldened. “ I don’t understand. Why are you here? _How_ are you here?”

Mary pouts and releases him. “You don’t want me here, Jizabel? I just wanted to visit you.” Her voice grows more serious, and he’s suddenly hit with a jolt of guilt. “You left with no notes, no goodbyes; your flat was empty, your telephone number is invalid, and you obviously don’t even check your emails, or maybe you’ve changed your email address. It took so long to track you down. We’ve been extremely worried. I thought… for a long time, I thought-….” 

He wishes he were the type of brother to crush her against his chest, to smell her hair and be reminded of the world _before,_ but he is not. He does not trust himself not to hurt her, and so he only watches as Mary awkwardly dawdles at his front step. “Come on in, Mary,” he whispers, an uncomfortable pressure building in the bridge of his nose. “I have been a poor host.” He takes a deep breath, leaning down and leveling their gaze, and he notices with a pang that he does not have to lean as low as he used to. “And, it appears, a poor sibling, to you.”

“It is cruel, it was, leaving without a word,” Mary says accusingly.

His smile freezes. He doesn’t want to think about it too long because Mary is crying openly, and as much as he pretends that human emotions do not concern him, it is much more difficult to pretend to not notice his own sister crying. “I couldn’t have stayed. Not in London, you know that. Cain…”

“Cain _misses_ you, brother. He doesn’t say it, but I know he does. Please, come back. _I_ miss you. I want you back,” she sniffs, and he feels the cracks within widen just a hairbreadth. He does not think this was still possible. He has been quite sure everything had crumbled to dust, a long time ago.

His only sister isn’t so little anymore. He sees it in the chiseling of her jaw, the gradual sharpening of her cheeks, the last of her baby fat still clinging to her youth, but soon, it, too, will shed. She will catch up to him, soon, in height, and he mourns all the time they have lost. “Come here, Mary,” he sighs finally, and she rushes in, her arms wound around his neck, and he waits for the impact, for the burn of skin on skin, but Mary is warm and soft and kind, and he releases a breath he did not know he was holding.

* * *

Mary is sipping on hot chocolate on the couch, and he’s tittering away in the kitchen with the excuse of making coffee for himself (all black this time; he needs it). His hands are trembling, and he’s sure it’s not from the medication because hell, it hasn’t entered his mind to take any medicine after _that_ day. Maybe he’s in withdrawal. Maybe the drugs have left their permanent mark. Maybe he’s dissolving into oblivion, at last.

“Jizabel? Are you okay in there?” Mary calls out from right behind him. 

He’s startled and almost drops his cup, but thankfully only a couple drops spill out onto his marble kitchen counter. “I’ll be right there, Mary. Go wait for me in the living room.”

The look of worry is still on her face, but she nods and totters away, casting glances over her shoulder every few steps. He sighs and leans his forehead against the hanging cabinet, closing his eyes as he hears Mary turns on the TV. _Good_ , he thinks, _it’ll buy me some time in here_.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to see his sister. He’s pleased, he thinks, or at least he should be. He has, in his own way, missed her. As far as siblings go, Mary has been the least complicated relationship in his life. It may have been because their age gap is so great that he feels more like an uncle to her, or that they were not raised together, or that she still lives with her organs intact, or that he did not spend two decades of his life envying her and hating her for robbing him of his inheritance and his father’s love.

So much of his life has been spent hating Cain, the knowledge of Cain’s existence like an inwardly spiked collar around his neck, tightening ever so slowly that he had grown used to the oozing wounds. He had learned to live around it, to take in small sips of his father’s affection and attention, to let hate fester beneath until that, too, spread through his whole being and out into the world, to Cain and Alexis and his mother and all those ignorant beings who dare to be whole when he is not. To be the firstborn and the failed experiment, watching at arms length as Father molded his perfect avatar, to skulk in the shadow and wade in blood at Delilah’s bidding as he watched Cain sheltered from the horror of it all, eternally paying penance for his original sin of existing. For all that his father harped on about Cain’s cursed heritage, all of his children share in the same sin of Alexis’ insatiable lust, that none of them should have ever been born.

The knowledge of a long-lost sister, then, should have ensnared her in his orbit of hate, but it did not. It could be that he felt a kind of bastard kinship with this girl who looks more like him than Cain, or that she was a girl and did not resemble Cain one bit, and certainly because his father never so much as gave her a second thought. Mary, unlike Cain, was never created with the sole purpose of replacing him, and if he tries very hard at pretending, he can almost feel something akin to love.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s sitting cross-legged in the overstuffed beige armchair, nursing a rapidly cooling cup of coffee on his lap. The TV is set on Disney Channel—my God, are they related?—but the background noises calm him. 

It’s just a little surreal to have Phineas and Ferb playing in his apartment (usually he only has to deal with the stupid show at work, when House decides to watch it “for the irony”). But everything about this situation is a bit surreal, so he decides that it’s for the best. Keeps him disconnected.

“Is Cain here with you?” he asks, his voice steadier than he feels. 

A long moment. “Yes,” his sister admits, her eyes dropping down to the dark mug in her hands. 

It’s a good recipe. He’s used the one from Angelina’s, his old haunt. It’s one of Jizabel’s favorite drinks from when he was still in Paris for medical school; he’s glad that she seems to like it. The thought allows him a moment of escape before he’s forced to understand the monosyllable coming out of her mouth. 

He’s shaking again, tiny imperceptible tremors that only he knows about. Must be the coffee. It’s too strong.

“Where is he?” He must have used a very cold tone because Mary twitches uncomfortably in her seat, and he softens. “How did you—how did he find me?”

“We’re staying in New York for a week. Brother and Riff are taking a little tour of the university. They dropped me off here earlier.” The words come out of her in a rush, and she takes a sip of the drink, swishing it around in her mouth a little before continuing. He really should have a talk with her about dental health. “Brother has been hiring private detectives to trace you since you left, but they haven’t found anything until recently. Did you know that your hospital directory has very poor security?” 

He should have known. He wants to slap his head in frustration at his own stupidity and carelessness. He knew working for the infamous House was going to be his ruin some day. He has just hoped that it would be later rather than sooner.

“So I begged Brother to let me come see you, and he agreed!” she continues excitedly, her pink mouth racing her mind so that the words come out in jumbled bursts. “He’s been really worried too, you know, I mean, we _are_ family. And I know he wants you to come back. He told me so. It’s hard for him, you know, taking on Father’s role, and he’s so young-….”

“So he only wants me back because he needs someone to take that burden off of him,” Jizabel concludes bitterly. “Well, tell him that a bastard has no claim to any of Father’s titles, or wealth, or societal standing, so he should just-“

“That’s not what I mean, Jizabel!”

“Isn’t that right? He’s angry that he had to become the Earl of Hargreaves at, what, fourteen? Fifteen? How absolutely _tragic_ ,” Jizabel spits venomously, his carefully composed calmness falling away in mere seconds. “How horrible his life must be, the rightful heir to father’s name. I suppose I should offer my condolences to the patricidal maniac."

“ _It was an accident!”_

“An accident that Father _fell out of a tower_ with Cain the only witness?” It is almost a shriek; it has been _so long_ since he last completely lost control, and he finds himself drawing in ragged breaths. “Cain might have gotten everyone else fooled, even the police and the medical examiner, but I know the truth. He killed Father. A _murderer_.” 

The coffee cup shatters in his hand. The shards of porcelain are splattered with red, and he doesn’t understand why. His coffee is black.

Ah. 

“Sinners must pay the price,” he says mechanically, the mess of white and red and brown on his lap the most interesting thing in the world. Father’s face, firm and tinged with disappointment, loomed over his teenage self. “And I am not my brother’s keeper. If I had stayed, I would have killed him.”

He looks at her. Her eyes are wide and scared, and he sees rain falling from those twin skies. “No one would believe me that he’s a monster. Not even you, Mary. I could have killed him, but you would have grown to hate me, and so would Father, for all that Cain had acted against him. So I left.

“My mother’s family had some money set aside for me in a trust, so I used that to fund my departure and set up here. That way I wouldn’t have to depend on Hargreaves money for anything.” The name feels slick, like poison on his tongue. “It’s not mine. It never was.”

The only thing linking him to that accursed name is the blood in his veins. And the scars on his back.

And of course, the madness. 

The silence between them grows ever thicker, punctuated with the occasional crashes on the TV and Phineas’ “Hey, where’s Perry?”’s. The spilled coffee has totally cooled, but he doesn’t mind the odd, sticky way his pants cling to his skin. 

Finally, Mary sets down her drink, crosses the small distance between them and kneels at his feet. Her white dress is rapidly soaking up the coffee and blood on the wooden floor, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She takes out a white handkerchief—lace with blue embroideries, and he hasn’t seen a real cloth handkerchief in ages—and begins to wipe at his bleeding hand, gentle and childish but somehow better than any professional medical’s touch. It is a shallow cut. When he looks down, the handkerchief is wrapped around his hand and tied in a clumsy knot, and she’s cradling his slender white hand in both of hers.

He doesn’t know how to feel. He’s empty and wrung out and inexplicably tired, as if all emotions have bled out onto the floor along with his blood.

“I won’t pretend to understand,” he hears her say, and he makes a small noise in the back of his throat as if to agree. “I just know that Cain would never do such a thing, no matter what Father did to him. _He was seventeen_. He couldn’t have done it, brother.” Here he interjects another noise, though this one is laced with much more disdain than the last. 

“And even if he did, maybe it’s a _good_ thing that Father is gone. Shouldn’t you be glad that he isn’t here to hurt the both of you anymore?” So she, too, knows. It seems that the whole world knows.

She should have known it was the wrong thing to say to him.

“You should leave,” he murmurs tonelessly, too numb to summon up anger and rage. It’s as if he’s peering at some version of Mary submerged underwater; he knows she’s there, he sees the rounded softness of her face and the curls of her hair, but she’s all distorted and foreign, and it feels as if he doesn’t know her at all. “I think we’ve said all we needed to say to each other today.” 

Because she’s not his little sister, this creature that stands before him trembling with anger and fear, defying him with words that cut deeper than father’s whip ever did. All of his sisters are gone.

“Go, Mary,” he says again, louder this time, and he slides his hand out of her loose grip. He stands up. Behind them, TV-Phineas is exclaiming, “There you are, Perry!” for what is probably the hundredth time in his short little animated life.

He turns off the TV, grabs the empty mug _,_ and heads for the kitchen. When he’s back in the living room, the mug is still sitting on his counter unwashed, and the girl who looks like his little sister is gone, the sheer white curtains the only movement in the room. He already has enough of sisters. 

Dropping down on both knees, he begins to pick up the scattered remnants of his once favorite cup. He cuts his fingers again, but it’s fine because it doesn’t even hurt that much. And he likes the way the kerchief is rapidly turning red. 

The broom and dustpan take care of what’s left of the shards, the liquid mess easily soaked up with a few sheets of paper towel, and thank God the apartment has hardwood floors because it would be absolutely miserable to vacuum the tiny slivers out of a carpet. When the floor is once more spotlessly clean, he drops into his favorite and only overstuffed chair, staring at the now-red handkerchief bravely trying to hold the splintered pieces of him together. There are small, blue scroll works all along the edges of the thing, which he does not recognize as one of his. 

He makes an aborted sound like a sob. On the corner, where Mary had tied the knot, in large, loopy cursive, is embroidered “Jizabel Hargreaves.” A wishful name from a life that has never been. He does not know whether it would be better to carry that name and still be discarded, or whether it was mercy on his father’s part to let him know from the start that he had never been, and will never be, his father’s true son.

He wonders if he had imagined the whole exchange, if Mary only exists in his head, and if perhaps he should get back on the medication again. As far as hallucinations go, this has been a good one.

_Was it a vision, or a waking dream?_

Maybe he should cry, or smile, or set off in a rage and throw a few plates around. But he’s tired and sick, and the effort of a rage fit eludes him.

He wakes up the next morning in the sunny living room, all pounding head and cottony mouth, to an empty bottle of red Bordeaux still clutched in his bound hand.

* * *

The longer Cassian stays in the hospital, the more it seems that the team is out to kill him than to treat his condition. The treatments have become increasingly experimental, and, faced with a body curiously resistant to pharmaceuticals, increasingly dangerous. Foreman has taken up the task of writing up Cassian as a case study, _for the sake of furthering understanding of the human body_. The worst of the side effects, thus far, even with treatments that may otherwise fall a horse, was several days of running to the bathroom and being rehydrated via saline IV.

Jizabel wonders, if he were in Cassian’s shoes, whether he would make the trade of an aging body for that eternally youthful, eternally healthful form.

They are not alone together as often these days. The team has taken a shine to the marvel of Cassian’s regenerative abilities, and much of his time is spent with Cameron or Foreman in the stress lab. Obtaining consent was not a difficult task; Cassian throws himself into the experiments with the desperation of a terminally ill patient, and Jizabel can only watch from behind the glass screen, get a sense of him through the computerized output of the EKG. He has become intimately familiar with imagings of Cassian’s brain. He thinks he can close his eye and point directly to the Sylvian fissure, rotated and flipped inside out. 

He still sees how Cassian’s brain would look, unfolded and sliced, every neuron ablaze. He sees the floating, graying brain. The eyeballs, still green with intensity. The optic nerves, fraying in the formalin.

And so, it is a surprise that they are alone again. He has just received a page to the stress lab to take over for Cameron, who has been paged to another patient’s side. The department is still running, allegedly, and _does not support just one patient at a time_ , Cuddy had said to House. 

Cassian is running on a treadmill, nodes and wires sticking out of his head and arms. The hospital gown flaps and agitates with each pounding step. Jizabel thinks of that first primitive film of a running horse, of the moment when all four hooves are lifted off the ground, of the briefest impression of flying. He wonders if Cassian, too, can fly.

Cassian gasps, “Hi, Doctor.” He is sweating, a little, and Jizabel notes the impressive power reading on the monitor. It is as if Cassian was engineered to be what he was. 

It is a damn shame for that all to go away.

“Cassian,” he says neutrally in greeting. 

“You look a little better today,” Cassian replies cheekily, smirking. “Healthier.”

“A little,” Jizabel replies dubiously, flatly. 

“You look like you’ve been eating a little more.”

“I eat enough,” Jizabel says curtly. “Tell me how you are feeling today.”

“Bored. Somewhat sad. Kind of anxious about all this. And very sorry if I offended you, last time. Or the time before that.”

Jizabel’s lips curl up, deciding between a sneer or a smirk. “I mean physically.”

“I feel all of those things in my body,” Cassian insists. 

He lets himself be charmed, just a little. 

Cassian has great endurance. After half an hour, Jizabel lets him off, records the numbers, and thinks that Cassian could have found better success as an athlete than a low-ranking member of organized crime. For his part, Cassian plops down on the belt of the treadmill, wiping away beads of sweat from his smooth upper lip. “Hey Doctor, do you ever think you were born at the wrong time?”

“Hm?” He feels that he was born wrong, but he does not think that is what Cassian is asking.

“I know a lot of people say that, like they feel like an old soul in a young body, like they should have been born in Medieval time or the Roaring Twenties and live a great life as a flapper, you know? Do you ever feel like that?” Cassian takes on a musing tone and lies down on the treadmill, pillowing his hands behind his head.

“Like you said, it’s something a lot of people think about.”

“I have these vivid dreams, sometimes, like recurring dreams. They look like scenes straight out of _Peaky Blinders_. And I’m dressed like some kind of street urchin-chimney sweep, and there are horses in the streets of London. The smell is awful. Wild, isn’t it?”

Jizabel smiles and thinks that he might appreciate the smell of horses over the stink of spilled gasoline. “It sounds like you have a very colorful imagination, Cassian, or perhaps you’ve watched too much _Peaky Blinders_.” 

“I’ve seen you in there, a few times, in a top hat and old fashioned cape. It’s kind of a good look on you.”

“I can assure you I would never wear a top hat,” Jizabel replies, amused. “Not in this economy.”

“Well, it’s my dream, not yours,” Cassian says sulkily. “Your hair is still long in them. I just can’t imagine you with short hair, I guess.”

Jizabel hums. He doesn’t remember when it was that he last had short hair, either. With his hair so long, he does not have to look at his uncovered back in the mirror. 

“I can see you doing well with the Peaky Blinders,” he says after a pause. “After all, you’ve had the right kind of training.” And perhaps he is being needlessly cruel, but he is but a vessel for bitterness and hatred, and sooner or later, his cup runneth over.

Cassian only snorts. “Yeah, well, I’ll make no excuses for the wrongs I’ve done. If you’ve been in my shoes, maybe you would understand what it’s like to have very few choices in life.”

Something Cassian had said before comes back to him. _I just think we have more in common than you think_. 

“Why did you seek me out here?” he abruptly asks. “There were other scientists in Delilah’s service. Why me?”

Cassian shrugs. “I don’t know. I told you I just followed my last assignment. I didn’t really have a clear goal. And…”

Cassian seems to struggle to find the words. Jizabel looks up from the monitor and catches Cassian’s frown, Cassian’s bottom lip seized between his teeth. “And what?”

Cassian makes a shrugging, sheepish sort of gesture. “It sounds stupid.”

“I’ve heard a lot of stupid things.”

“This one may take the cake, then. It’s like… I feel kind of responsible, in a sense, knowing what I know, seeing what I have seen, of you, and of the Cardmaster. That because I didn’t do anything before, now it’s kind of like a very belated way to try and make it right. To… protect you. I don’t know what from. Maybe burglars or overzealous admiring patients. Or maybe from rabid dogs. You pet stray animals too indiscriminately.” 

“You think that stalking me is a way of making things right,” Jizabel repeats disbelievingly. 

Cassian winces. “It sounds really bad when you put it like that. I’m not stalking. Or, well, just a little bit. Sorry. I just try to keep a general eye on you.”

“What exactly have you seen, then?” Jizabel asks, thinking of the night with Cassandra that he cannot remember, his stomach twisting. 

“I don’t actually spend all my time following you around, you know,” Cassian snorts. “I usually see you at the grocery store or the farmer’s market. Just often enough to know that you’re alive. And, well, sometimes I see you feed the ducks at the park. You look… happy there. I never saw that look on your face when you were with Delilah.”

Jizabel laughs incredulously. The concepts of happiness and Delilah are rather mutually exclusive. Cassian seems to realize that, too, and sheepishly mumbles, “Yeah, OK, fair point. While we’re on stupid things, I’ll just say, my dreams of horse-shit London weren’t always cool or interesting. Sometimes, I see you die, and I had to bury you. I guess the dreams scared me enough that I wanted to make sure that wouldn’t happen in real life.”

Hearing of his dream-death does not frighten Jizabel, but it is surprising. “That’s very touching,” he drawls, “but unnecessary. I’m just a stranger to you. What does it matter if I get bitten by a rabid dog?”

“That’s the thing,” Cassian mutters, avoiding eye contact. “It doesn’t feel like you’re a stranger. Never mind, I told you it was stupid. Can I go back to my room now?”

* * *

They find themselves alone again, a few days later. It is early morning, and the hospital is beginning to rise, abuzz with noise. The clinic is packed today. The team draws straws, and he is the lucky one who gets to duck out to see to their special patient.

Cassian is on the seventh Harry Potter book. He still has not found a bookmark, and the creased spine and bent pages still rile Jizabel up like little else can.

“When you came to work for Delilah,” he begins upon opening the door. And stops. He was the one who said they would never talk about Delilah or the past, and time and again, he is the one to bring it up.

“I was young,” Cassian confirms. His expression grows more somber, and he tucks the book under his thigh, bending it back over itself. “But not that young. At that point, it was already quite clear what I was, the deficiency. There were few options for me.”

Jizabel hesitates. “My father- what did you know of him? Did you interact with him?”

“A few times,” Cassian says, nodding. “Listen, I don’t know what your relationship with him was like. All I know was what happened to you and that you seem to get riled up when he is involved. I don’t want to say something that would upset you. I have a lot of… ah, strong opinions about the Cardmaster.”

“You don’t know what happened to me.” _No one does._ “Nothing _happened_ to me.” _A lot of things happened because of me_. 

“OK, so let’s say I don’t. Will you tell me?”

“No.” If he speaks it into being, he will certainly have erased his father from his memories. It is best kept inside, private, a treasure that only he can gaze upon.

Cassian regards him for a moment. “You smile a lot, but I don’t think you mean it.” 

“Don’t I?” 

“It actually looks kind of painful. Like you’re trying really hard.” He pauses. “You don’t have to try hard with me."

Jizabel snorts. “I am not trying. And you are not special.”

“I think I am, a little,” Cassian retorts. “I just want you to know that you can be real with me. I think it would be nice, just a little, if you don’t have to work so hard all the time.”

“I’m a hard worker,” Jizabel says, indifferently. He does work hard, far harder than is typical of nobly born heirs. But then again, he is nobody’s heir. 

In his own way, he has already opened up to Cassian far more than he would to anyone else, and this frightens him. Despite all the lies and secrecy, or perhaps because of them.

Cassian has never asked Jizabel to trust him. _Let me help you_. The choice of words was deliberate. But with what?

This is still a transaction. A brain transplant for, what, a friend? Jizabel needs no friends. Medical marvel or not, he will only be too happy for this case to be over. 

He is an excellent liar, especially to himself. 

* * *

The next time he sees Cassian, he brings a bookmark. Just a simple thing, a paper bookmark that once came free with a book purchase. A bird in flight, printed on glossy cardstock.

“For your books,” he says, holding out the piece of paper. “Those books never wronged you.”

Cassian grins easily, and Jizabel sometimes envies that. “You are considerate, Doctor. More than you want to let on. Like that time there was a large service dog in the hall, and everyone was freaking out, but not you. You stopped them from harassing her.”

“Hm. I like books, and I like dogs,” Jizabel says dismissively. “I don’t like seeing them treated poorly.”

Cassian takes the proffered bookmark and regards him cooly. “But you treat yourself poorly. Is it because you don’t like yourself?”

“Do you?” Jizabel challenges. 

“I do.” Cassian says, smirking. “I like you. You say mean things to me, sometimes, but I think it’s just a front. I think you’re a lot kinder than you let on.”

Jizabel barks a laugh, surprised. “Following me around doesn’t mean you know anything about me.” _It is the only reason you would think that I am worthy of something like that._

“Then let me.”

Part of him wants to, Jizabel thinks. But he doesn’t know how. 

* * *

They are sitting in the hospital courtyard. Around them, families are taking walks, pushing wheelchairs, and nurses in scrubs mill about on their breaks. Jizabel takes his seat on a long wooden bench, and Cassian stretches languidly on the scruffy lawn. The grass is coming back in splotchy tufts, but that does not seem to bother Cassian, who closes his eyes and pushes the sleeves of his hospital gown up to his shoulders. Cassian’s skin is taking on a lovely golden color, bathed in sunshine. Spring has come early this year. Jizabel, for his part, has begun to put on sunscreen in the morning before work. For all that is already wrong with him, let skin cancer not add to the list. 

The birds are returning from their voyage south. Swallows, blue jays, warblers, making new nests in old haunts. The leaves on the trees are yet curled buds, but in just a few weeks, he is sure that the canopies will ablaze in blooms. 

Two particularly adventurous young barn swallows approach him fearlessly, bouncing along in small hops across the slats of the bench. A common enough kind of bird. A third swallow comes to join, this one bold enough to hop onto his crossed leg, resting on the upper sole of his shoe. Unbidden, a smile comes to Jizabel’s face. It has been such a long, unforgiving winter, even as the weather itself has been mild for this part of the world. 

“You look like a… a Disney…” Cassian starts and, seeing the vaguely murderous expression on Jizabel’s face, pivots, “... character. Because of the… birds,” he finishes lamely. At some point, he has opened his eyes and bears witness to the bird invasion. 

Jizabel only lifts an eyebrow sardonically. He flexes his foot; the bird, disturbed, flies up and lands on his shoulder. He wishes he has brought along some seeds, but he did not think they would have time to laze around outside today, nor did he think the weather would be nice enough to permit this excursion.

Cassian is looking at him with something akin to awe. “Animals really seem to love you,” he comments. 

Jizabel hums. Animals are kind. It is much more than he can say about other people. 

Apropos of nothing, Cassian blurts out, “I want to kiss you, Doctor.” 

“No.”

“Is it because of how I look?” Cassian asks, defiant. "I'm not a child. I'm older than you. I could already legally smoke by the time you were in grammar school." 

_No. Yes. And no_. The reasons are innumerable. 

“You’re my patient.” He almost winces. He does not mean to imply that ownership, that relationship. He does hate the use of possessive pronouns.

“But not forever.” 

He acquiesces. “No, not forever.”

“So when I’m no longer your patient, I can kiss you?”

“I didn’t say that.” 

“But you implied that.”

“You’re free to interpret whatever you’d like,” Jizabel says breezily. He thinks it may be nice to be kissed by Cassian. Cassian is kind. He doesn’t know what Cassian’s motives are, but he wonders if, for once, it might be alright to not care. 

* * *

This time, when Cassandra propositions him in their shared garden, he is drunk, but he is conscious enough to know that this is happening, and he finds himself unable to say no.

His body nestles perfectly within the curves and angles of Cassandra’s form, and he knows this is wrong, but he doesn’t know how to escape from this cycle. Cassandra’s hand lazily trails the molten silver of his hair, and he shudders with a potent cocktail of ecstasy and revulsion.

“God, you are exquisite. It’s almost like fucking an angel. I wonder what you will look like blindfolded and tied up, spread open for me. Dripping for me. Something we can try next time, mm?”

Cassandra’s voice is low and deep, a susurrus of footsteps in an autumn forest, and Jizabel registers just how very unfair it is that he is forced to make that comparison for so abhorrent a man. His father always said that the Devil was God’s most beautiful creation, and while he would not exactly use the phrase to describe Cassandra, he is drawn so helplessly to this, or at least to the feeling of being engulfed in Cassandra’s orbit. It almost feels like paying penance for all that he has sinned. The rotten feeling sitting deep in his gut every time Cassandra touches him is how he should be feeling, all the time. And if Cassandra is a little rough while they engage in sodomy, well, it is only rightful that sinning should hurt. He thinks of his father’s whip and the calm that descended with each strike, the feeling of being stripped bare, of submission and obedience, and finds himself wishing that Cassandra will give in to darker urges.

Biblical angels are fearsome, awful creatures of wrath and glory. He wonders if that is what Cassandra thinks of him. Somehow he doubts it, but he would very much like to be a Biblical Ophanim, a fiery wheel covered in eyes, guarding the throne of God. He thinks he would very much like to set Cassandra afire, crushing him into a thousand-eyed embrace of flames. 

Cassandra’s body is tall and aristocratically built. His arms radiate coiled strength, and they are firm and tight around Jizabel’s frame. His chest is lightly scattered with dark hair and well-developed, and his thighs are those of a runner, heavy and solid. It is the kind of body that either engenders safety or danger. He thinks of Cassian and how different Cassian’s arms would feel around him. It is wrong, he thinks, to fantasize of that childish body, and he very resolutely does not.

“I’ve been waiting for you for a very, very long time, Jizabel.” 

Implausible. They had barely known each other for two years since Cassandra moved into that condo. The man does like to boast in hyperboles.

Cassandra was right on one thing. Jizabel did make it back here, to Cassandra’s apartment, to his bed. The same cover he had awakened under that day now lies soiled at the foot of the bed, evidence of what Jizabel had done in his weakness. And still, he has not left.

“I’ve always known we were meant to be together,” Cassandra murmurs into the nape of Jizabel’s neck. His long nose teases the sensitive area just below Jizabel’s ear. “I see us in my dreams, you know. Lifetimes and lifetimes, intertwined. We always meet eventually, I know that for certain. You can say it’s a gift of mine.” 

Something about Cassandra’s words, said so dreamily, seems shrouded in steel, and God, he has had enough of people dreaming about him. Jizabel shudders uncontrollably as Cassandra continues the caresses down the length of his body. Cassandra’s fingers deftly find the hardened nubs on his chest, and with a sudden, hard twist, draw out a stuttered gasp from his mouth. He wants to stop, but he knows his protests are weak and without heat. The heat is pooling somewhere in his gut, rising and dipping and building in intensity, and he quickly thinks of Cassian’s constant frown. Always disapproving, Cassian. He wonders what Cassian would say if he can see Jizabel now, if he still thinks Jizabel needs saving, deserves salvation.

“Well, I’m ready for next time,” Cassandra whispers into his ear, and bites. 

Unworthy. Pathetic. Drawn to the people who would hurt him. As Cassandra clambers over his prone form and begins to tear at the exposed skin of his torso, Jizabel wonders whether Cassian would hurt him, too, and finds himself swallowing back bile.

* * *

“For a surgeon, you are really careless of your hands,” Cassian remarks. When he woke up the day after Mary left, he could not find the embroidered handkerchief she had tied around his hand. It must have fallen somewhere, and he had lost it in his stupor. In any case, the wound was shallow and did not merit great concern. Only a thin line, scabbed over, remains of the incident. 

“Mm. Accident,” he says dismissively, pulling his sleeve down surreptitiously.

Cassian frowns. “It’s always some kind of accident with you and your hands. Hey, you know that you need your hands in peak condition for my surgery, right? I don’t want to wake up seeing everything in green because you messed up.” 

They have finally given up on alternative approaches, with Foreman and Chase both admitting defeat. The only thing left to do is to find the right donor, but so far, they have not had any luck. The list of criteria is long, and no one wants to cut corners for a surgery of this magnitude.

Cassian is to be discharged tomorrow, barring any complication that arises between now and then, which is rather unlikely given the man’s oxen strength. Jizabel feels a pang of something he can’t quite name. 

“Would you like to see things in all red, then? I can do that.” He hangs another saline bag on Cassian’s IV line. Cassian isn’t dehydrated, exactly, but while the line is still in…

Cassian’s scowl deepens. “I’m serious. You should be more careful. An accident is once or twice. Since I’ve been here, your hand has been wrapped up more often than not. Can you really say they have all been accidents?”

“Yes,” Jizabel snaps. “This is getting out of hand, Cassian. You’re not in charge of my health. You are the patient here. Now sit still while I check your reflexes.”

Cassian opens his mouth, thinks better of it, and snaps it shut, glaring at Jizabel as the doctor stretches his arms this way and that. When Jizabel taps on his knee caps, he winces. 

“Does that hurt?” Jizabel asks, frowning. He taps again.

“No, just surprised,” Cassian mumbles. “‘S fine.”

“You have to tell me if you feel anything out of the ordinary,” Jizabel warns. He knows he is not one to practice what he preaches. Just days before, when the wound on his hand had not yet scabbed over, sometimes he would glance down at it to find that it had been bleeding again through the bandage. It had given the old lady he saw in clinic earlier that week an awful fright.

Cassian mutters something unintelligible and shifts uncomfortably on the bed, legs dangling beneath his gown. “What was that?” asks Jizabel.

“Nothing,” Cassian stubbornly affirms.

“If it’s medically relevant, I need to know.”

“It’s not,” insists Cassian.

Jizabel lifts an eyebrow, dubious. “Alright, then. I’ll have someone check back in by tonight. If everything is fine, you’ll be able to leave tomorrow morning until the surgery is scheduled.”

Cassian nods. As Jizabel sets up to leave, Cassian appears to think better of it, and blurts out, “Are you hurting yourself because of your father?”

Jizabel stiffens. “What?”

“I don’t think anything is accidental with you.”

“I don’t see how this is any concern of yours what I do or don’t do,” Jizabel spits out. “You’re overstepping, with your ridiculous little crush.” 

“Well, something isn’t right,” Cassian shoots back. “I think you’re still stuck in Delilah, with the Cardmaster, even after all these years. I watch you. You’re always looking over your shoulders for something. Sometimes you take long pauses when you speak, like you’re stuck in your own head. You smile and laugh, and none of it seems real. You ignore your coworkers. You don’t eat, you clearly don’t sleep, and you look like you’re a breeze away from dropping. Did your father mess you up so badly that even three years after he died, you’re hurting yourself because he’s not here to hurt you?”

He is seeing white. The sounds in the room rise to a deafening screech, and he can scarcely think. His body seems to move of its own volition, an automaton trained to kill. He hears his father’s voice, one lone intelligible sound above the rest, scolding of his insubordination and warning of eternal hellfire. He wants to touch his back, to check on the scars. He thinks they may be bleeding. 

Instead, his right hand finds itself around Cassian’s throat, and the left hand brandishes the scalpel hidden in his pocket. Cassian’s eyes are wide and fearful, for a brief moment, and then he narrows his eyes and clutches at Jizabel’s grip on his neck.

“Doctor,” he chokes. “Jizabel.” 

Jizabel blinks, an eternity stretching between one breath and the next. His hands loosen, the scalpel sliding from his grasp, and he pushes Cassian back with a gasp. He feels blood rushing from his head, and a wave of vertigo hits him so strongly that he staggers backward until he finds the wall. 

“Would you actually do it?” Cassian mutters, groaning as he rubs at his neck. Jizabel’s vice-like grip will likely leave bruises. 

“I told you, never bring up my father or Delilah again,” Jizabel snarls. He quickly retrieves his weapon and clasps his hands behind him, drawing down the sleeves of his white coat to cover his shaking fingers. “If you want to go under my scalpel sooner than planned, then you are welcome to. I can guarantee it will be slow and painful.”

Cassian’s lips curl bitterly. “So you are your father’s son, after all.”

The words are a twist of the knife and a salve. “I am. And you would do best to not forget that. Whatever you think you know about me, whatever it is you dream about, I’m not some damned damsel in distress for you to save. You’re just my father’s hired help.”

This time, when he turns to leave, Cassian does not stop him. 

* * *

There is a park across from the hospital. Most people don’t make a habit of hanging out around hospitals when they absolutely do not have to, and the park is blessedly empty, especially after midnight. He runs into fewer of his colleagues here, as compared to the hospital courtyard. The last thing he wants right now is to face anyone who may have heard the commotion in Cassian’s room.

He sags against the granite park bench, letting his shoulders hunch. With a swift motion, he slips off his hair tie and cards fingers through his hair impatiently, working out the tangles with a violence that yanks hair from the roots. He curls into himself, letting his hair hang about his face and obscuring his vision. There is no one here to chastise him, not about his posture. There hasn’t been, in a long time. 

“Hello, darling.”

Someone is sitting next to him. Cassandra.

Wearily, he lifts his face and slides his glasses back on. The hour grows late, and Cassandra is dressed as if he has just returned from a nightclub. Which, context clue, he probably did.

“What are you doing here?” Jizabel demands tiredly. 

“I should be asking you that,” Cassandra replies, smirking. “Being a doctor seems like such hard work. You’re still at the hospital at this hour. Are you sure they are paying you enough?”

“No,” Jizabel says shortly. 

Cassandra hums. “I can take care of you, darling. You can quit this job if you’d like.”

Jizabel barks a laugh, incredulous. “You must be mad.”

“I do have a business proposition for you, you know. I’m not in the habit of keeping kept boys,” Cassandra snorts inelegantly. “Ah, I didn’t know when would be a good time to bring this up, but no time like the present.” Cassandra’s smirk grows wider, his voice turning oilier with each syllable. “Let’s just say it has been no accident that we live so close to each other.”

Suspicion rises up his throat like acid, and Jizabel struggles to control his voice. “Be frank. What do you mean?”

“Well, we’ve had a really good time together, wouldn’t you say, _Death_?” 

He should be used to this by now. He shouldn’t even be shaking, shouldn’t feel the chill spreading up his spine and through his extremities. By this point, he should just assume that everyone he sees is connected to Delilah, sent by Delilah. The thought is almost comforting. _Father_ … _could it be?_

His naked hope must have shown on his face. “Your father?” Cassandra sneers. “Alexis has nothing to do with this. He is dead. But your father is not Delilah. Delilah is not a snake, dead when its head is cut off. Delilah is a hydra. Another head will sprout, and, well, who better to lead it than its High Priest? And a new Cardmaster needs his cards around him.”

A lot of things suddenly make sense. All of Cassandra’s cryptic whispers, disguised as bedroom talks. _Lifetimes and lifetimes_. Jizabel cannot believe how stupid he has been to ignore all of the signs when they were practically presented to him on a platter. 

“Are you starting to remember? You do know that every Major Arcana went through an initiation. Do you remember what happened at your initiation, my dear Death?” 

His initiation. 

Over the years, he has stopped questioning the gap in his memories of that night. For many years, he insisted to his father that he was content to stay within the ranks of the Minor Arcana, citing medical school and his busy studies and his dozens of projects within Delilah. For all that he wanted to please Father, something had told him that he did not want to go through initiation. Until one night, he did, and he awakened as Death in his father’s arms, a single kiss on his forehead, and he clung to that memory as the only one that matters.

“No?” Cassandra asks mockingly. He tilts Jizabel’s head toward his, a soft touch on the chin, and his hand unfurls to cup at Jizabel’s jaw, his index finger stroking the smooth skin of Jizabel’s cheek in a steady rhythm. “Look at me, Jizabel. Look into my eyes. Remember.”

Jizabel shudders and does as he is told. He has no strength to resist. Cassandra’s eyes are narrow slits of gray in the darkness, and the streetlamp casts a golden hue on his irises. 

“Remember, Death.” 

And Jizabel does.

_What do you see? What do you hear?_

Something inside him breaks. Images come flooding, broken free of their carefully constructed prison. He sees himself from above, clad in a plain cotton robe, a crown of thorn on his head. Candles littered on the floor, an ornate summoning circle, and he is at its center. He sees Cassandra dressed in priestly attire, sees his mind torn open and ripped bleeding, all of his worst memories coming to life at the same time. Each layer of his consciousness peeled back, every dark thought he has ever had raked through, every shameful desire laid bare, until his skin too was bare, shivering in the chill of the cavernous dungeon. Cassandra draws out more, and more, and more, until Jizabel is shaking under the force of the memories, until he is screaming his throat raw, clawing desperately at his head, the thorns in his hair piercing through his fingers and palms in gross imitations of stigmata. All around them stand the other Major Arcanas in hoods, all bearing witness to his total destruction. And then Cassandra announces that he has been reborn, and the chanting starts, and the hooded figures crowd around him, nameless fingers touching and taking. His father, standing at a distance, gazed upon him dispassionately and walked away. 

He must have made some kind of sound. He can’t see anything beyond the memories, can’t hear anything beyond the rhythmic chanting, but he knows Cassandra is smiling. 

A familiar voice breaks into the commotion in his head. “Hey! Leave him alone!” 

Cassian is running toward them, shoeless and panting, wearing only his thin hospital gown on a chilly spring night. He comes to an abrupt stop in front of the bench and doubles over, gasping. “Doctor, are you OK?”

“Who are you?” Cassandra demands, taking in Cassian’s small frame and hospital attire, and turns to Jizabel. “Who’s this kid, Jizabel?”

Jizabel can’t bring himself to speak. He tries, but what comes out sounds suspiciously like a whimper. He can’t breathe. His airway is closing, and it is just like before, before his sisters had died for him. He is sure he is dying. The world narrows at the edges, darkening, and he gasps desperately and clutches at his throat.

“Doctor!” Cassian shouts, rushing to his side. He turns to Cassandra and narrows his eyes. “I know you. You’re the High Priest.”

Cassandra lets out a surprised laugh. “I’m afraid I don’t know you, little one.”

“You wouldn’t,” Cassian confirms. “I wasn’t ever highly ranked enough to formally meet the High Priest.”

Cassandra turns to Jizabel, heedless of what looks to be a medical emergency, and laughs. “Jizabel, I did not know you keep such esteemed company. And here I thought you wanted nothing to do with Delilah. I would have said something sooner, had I known.” He turns back to Cassian and calculatingly regards him. “I suppose you would make a good spy. No one would suspect a child.”

“I’m not a child,” Cassian grits out. “Let him go. You’re hurting him.”

Cassandra smirks and makes a show of running his fingers through Jizabel’s hair, gathering it into a single ponytail at the nape of his neck. “I am not. Jizabel, you’re fine. Don’t be so dramatic, we have business to discuss, don’t we?”

He thinks he will faint. He estimates that he has about two more minutes of ineffectually gasping for air before his brain feels the impact of anoxia, and he shrinks into himself, away from Cassandra’s touch. The force rips out a few strands of his hair, and he bites his lip to keep from crying out. He will not cry in front of Cassandra.

Cassian, furious, shoves at Cassandra, the scene comically reminiscent of paintings depicting David and Goliath. Cassandra releases Jizabel’s hair and stands, towering over Cassian’s much smaller frame, and sneers. “You fool. You really have no idea what you’re dealing with, do you? I’ll ask you again to leave us, but I am not above hurting a child if you insist on being difficult.”

“I am not a child,” Cassian roars and shoves again. Cassandra snarls, sending Cassian stumbling with a backhand across the face. Jizabel makes himself focus enough to see Cassandra advance on Cassian, and, scrambling to his feet, fingers the scalpel in his pocket and flicks the cap off, stabbing blindly at Cassandra’s back and drawing blood.

Cassandra grunts and staggers, momentarily shocked by the sudden pain. He whips around and faces Jizabel, pulling a gun from his coat’s pocket. “Jizabel, don’t be stupid,” he warns, aiming the gun at Jizabel’s chest. “Stop this nonsense. Join me. You will sit at my right side, the way Alexis never let you.” His grin is like a sneer, lewd and hateful. “I’ll give you everything you’ve ever wanted and never received.”

“I’d rather sit on your corpse,” Jizabel rasps out between shallow breaths, wielding his scalpel in front of him like a sword. His world spins. He sees Cassian’s determined face behind Cassandra, sees him mouthing something that Jizabel cannot make out.

“That’s a pity. I’d really hoped it wouldn’t come to this, my dear Jizabel,” Cassandra sighs, cocks his gun, and pulls the trigger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nobody asked for a Cain Saga x House MD crossover extra-light magical realism, but here we are.
> 
> It's hard being a sad murdery boi these days. Tsk. Jack the Ripper had it easy.
> 
> Peaky Blinders was a real and notorious English gang active after WWI. It is also an excellent TV series starring the inimitable Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby. I would highly recommend it. Like oh my god, that face? #shallow
> 
> Honestly I just want to read someone write about Jizabel doing yoga and crying while in pigeon pose. I think this will make my whole year. Please. Someone.


	4. surrender to the earth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shorter chapter this week because I feel like the last chapter was A Lot.

Jizabel used to love anatomy lab, even if the cadaver is cold and bloodless. Still does. There’s something about the human body that invites curiosity that shades into obsession. He knows something is seriously, _seriously_ wrong with him, but that piece of knowledge arouses no emotion that he can name. _There’s something wrong with everyone,_ he reasons, and he immediately takes it back in his own mind. Everyone encompasses Father, and he knows there is—no, was—nothing wrong with his father.

He bends over the operating table and stares impassively at the body lying atop. The floppy, greasy brown hair has been shaved, revealing a well-shaped head. The man’s eyes, so often alive with mirth and tinged with cruelty, are peaceful and gently shut. Tubes stream out of him from artificial orifices, connecting him to the steady beep of the ECMO machine that takes over for his heart and lungs . He looks younger like this, shrouded in silence. Nicer.

It was a tenuous conversation to have with the man’s family. He was— _is?_ —a registered organ donor, to the shock of nearly everyone who knows him. He’s not _dead_ dead, as in all of his organs have not yet shut down, but he is legally dead now. Harvard criteria dead. His organs are up for harvest, _but wait,_ Jizabel asked, _would you consider honoring his life to the extent that medical science can?_

The tearful mother had peered at him from beneath the grief. “What’s that?”

He explained his theories and research, cited the studies, a hint of passion surfacing beneath the numbness that has become his constant companion. Brain transplant. It’s really showing a lot of promise. It’s experimental, but think about the implications. 

“No,” she’d cried out. “That’s grotesque. How can that be? Someone else in my son’s body?” _An abomination_ , he had thought. _An affront to God, as he is._

It’s what Cassandra would have wanted. It would be a medical breakthrough. This will shake the world as we know it. Cassandra will become immortalized in history. Please, just consider. He said all this and more, unsure of whether or not he was still in his body or just a dissonant voice. Please. I know him. We were close. He would have wanted this.

He had built his castle with lies.

And somehow, Mrs. Gladstone acquiesced. He didn’t understand what finally changed her mind, but he rushed the paperwork into her hands, the frantic beats of his heart the only sound he could hear. He does not consider whether she is, or was, connected with Delilah, if she knows of what her son has been up to. It is beyond him now, what Cassandra had been in life. He had brought all of his secrets to be entombed in this body, alive by artifice.

The operation is too sudden. Jizabel does not have enough time to prepare. He racks his brain for every bit of knowledge he has ever obtained, through formal medical training or otherwise, and comes up wanting. He only knows of one person who can help, and, against his every wish, he calls a number he never expected to dial, receives temporary privilege for his guest, and just like that, three Major Arcanas of Delilah are united under one roof once more. 

And now, there lies the Hierophant in front of him, silent as he should always have been. His tormentor. His lover. His sin. He is unsure if there is a difference.

He swallows hard, anticipation thrumming along his arms and legs. He thinks of what Cassandra had said that night, that comparison to angels. It turns out that Jizabel is not the Ophanim he wanted to be, after all, but Azrael, four-faced and thousand-eyed.

The Hermit hands the Angel of Death the scalpel, and Jizabel makes the first cut.

* * *

The operation lasts a little over 31 hours. His team is with him the entire time, and they are well supplied with fresh residents. Chase and Cameron switch in and out, and House ducks in over the intercom, interjecting snide comments at regular intervals. Jizabel is at the helm, steering, with Zenopia at the assist. His hands are remarkably steady, and he can barely feel the twinge of the semi-healed hairline fracture in his left hand. Despite his best efforts, he has not yet crippled himself.

The bodies lie side by side, both shaven and nude. The disparity in their size is stark. Their eyes are closed, and Jizabel knows that at least one of those pairs will never open again. He doesn’t know how to feel about this knowledge. 

It is monotonous work, the act of connecting vessels to vessels, nerves to nerves, but Jizabel thrives on it. The first bloom of blood upon opening, the sound of wet organs pushed out of the way for his blade, even the smell of necrotic tissues as he lifts them, rubbing a gloved thumb over the rot, and decides to grant life. He is Death, and Death chooses when it takes. 

Death will not take Cassian today. But first, he must sever the connections tethering Cassian’s brain to his dying body. The brain is a greedy thing, its vassal vessels vast, and it devours its weight in blood. Jizabel’s scalpel is sharp and true, his cuts decisive. The image of Cassian’s eyes, lit up in mirth, a crooked grin tugging at his lips, come unbidden. 

He slices through the optic nerve. 

* * *

Cassandra’s body has not moved in three days. Jizabel is very careful to refer to it as such. There is no guarantee that the transplant has worked. There is no way to know if the person who wakes up will be truly Cassian.

The body does not breathe. The medical coma necessitates the use of a ventilator, so that the machine rhythmically inflates and deflates the lungs, and the artificial breaths are slow, the rising and falling of the chest unnatural. The heart does beat, and that is the best that can be said of the outcome of this surgery. Until Cassian wakes up, or doesn’t. 

He does not consider himself religious, for all his black cross and the Bible verses singing in his head. He doesn't think his father ever truly was, either. But in this moment, he has to wonder—is the brain truly the vessel of the mind, the soul? Is it that simple, to transfer one brain into another body, and count that new amalgamation as belonging to the brain? Or is it possible that the soul resides in several places on the body, and those scattered pieces will fuse together to the incoming brain and incoming soul, and a new being altogether will emerge? 

These are questions he does not have the answer for, and for once, he is afraid to find out. 

He does not consider himself rash. When he ended Cassandra’s life, he knew what he was doing, had considered the consequences of his actions, and had orchestrated the scene exactly as it should have been for outsiders to find. He may, however, allow that he has not thoroughly thought about the implications of what it would mean for Cassian to wake up in Cassandra’s body. It would not matter for Cassian. They had scarcely met before. 

He thinks of those nights spent in Cassandra’s bed. He remembers the moans, the groans, the peaks of ecstasy, and the empty void where his heart should have been. He remembers the feel of Cassandra’s cock and fist filling him from both orifices, how he was choking and spluttering and his body rejecting its invaders, how everything clenched and unclenched and released in complete abandon. He remembers the touch of Cassandra’s skin, the scent, unmistakable. He wonders if Cassian will smell the same, if he wakes up. 

In his deepest heart of heart, he almost wishes the body would not open his eyes. He thinks of Schrodinger’s cat, and he believes the man has the right idea. The body is simultaneously Cassandra and Cassian, and he will not find out until it opens its eyes. If Cassian doesn’t wake up, then the both of them are alive, together. 

Jizabel would not have to look into the body’s eyes and wonder who it is that he is seeing.

He dislikes thinking of Cassandra. There is an overwhelming sense of shame and anger, always, punctuated by lust and satiation. But he craves it, being demeaned, being taken, being forced split open as he has once been split open in another way. Cassandra was a lover of variety. There were moments of gentleness, too. Cassandra’s hands could be gentle, his embraces almost reverent, only to turn bitter to suit Cassandra’s mercurial whims. Cassandra was a drug, and Jizabel has become quite willingly addicted to him. And now, that body, lying still, may be his methadone. It is either his salvation, or the continuation of his slowly controlled descend.

What if the transplant has worked, after all? He doesn’t know how he would react to seeing Cassian’s eyes within Cassandra’s face. Whatever it is that has blossomed between them—he dares not hope for it to continue. It would not work. There is already too much history between him and that body. Having Cassian in the mix—well, three is perhaps too much company for him. 

He wonders if, by saving Cassian’s life, he has doomed _them_. 

He decides that it is a good enough trade. For once, he will not be selfish. 

* * *

Cassandra drew him a bath. Jizabel curled into himself under the cover, clutching desperately at his cross, mentally reciting the prayers that his father intoned as Jizabel was cleansed of his sins time and again. It seemed that men who claimed to love him were always trying to cleanse him of sins that they themselves committed.

The air grew fragrant with scented oil, a heady scent of white flowers that sent stabs of pain to the pressure point behind his eyes. Cassandra approached the bed, removed the cover with a flourish, and regarded his nude body hungrily. Without waiting for Jizabel to move, Cassandra easily scooped him up, arms steady beneath his knees and around his shoulders. It was very possible that without Cassandra’s maneuvers, he would not have made it to the bathroom on his own shaking legs. He felt boneless, ragged, emptied of will and thoughts and strength.

Cassandra set him into the bath. It is a standalone, clawfootted beauty, clearly an antique. Cassandra clothed himself in opulence, surrounded himself by echoes of faded grandeur. He was reminded of his father’s large manor, of the stiffness of the armchairs and the overly polished staircases, and remembered just how much he disliked the word _heritage_. What had he inherited but madness and loss?

He tried to lift his head above the tepid water, thought better of it, and let himself submerge completely. Cassandra watched him silently, perching on the edge of the tub, fully clothed in tight trousers and a loose silk blouse in royal blue. From under the water, he could see Cassandra’s features distorted, wavy and soft, and pretended that the smile on Cassandra’s face was kind. He contemplated letting go of his breath, letting the water fill his lungs, weighing down his empty vessel until he is bursting with substance. He took one deep breath in, water flooding his airway, immediately feeling the rising instinctual panic that creatures of his kind had recognized as the harbinger of death for eons, and exhaled the last of his air into the water.

He did not know if he could not move or if he did not care to move. Cassandra’s hands reached into the water, sleeves unrolled and wet, and grasped the sides of his face, yanking him up. “You can’t leave me this way, my dear,” Cassandra murmured calmly, unconcerned. “Not like this.” The water had grown cool, though no colder than the air. He shivered, choked up perfumed water, head lolling against the edge of the tub, and watched dispassionately as Cassandra picked up a sponge and lathered soap onto his arms, his thighs, letting Cassandra arrange and rearrange his limbs, letting him work scented shampoo into his hair and gently rinsed it off. “I’ll take care of you,” Cassandra had said, kissing his feet. “I’ll never be as barbaric as to mar your beautiful skin.”

He laid docile in Cassandra’s arms, gathered from the bathtub to the bed and cocooned in a thick white towel. Cassandra dedicated himself to drying Jizabel’s hair, brushing it, anointing it with oil. “I like you best like this,” Cassandra whispered to him, chin on his shoulder. “I want you forever like this. How shall that be accomplished, do you think? Can you promise to always be good for me? I think not. I rather do like it when you are willful, but just briefly so.”

Jizabel did not know if he could respond. His head swam, whether from fatigue or fever or his near drowning, and he only let himself be pushed back onto the plush bedding, Cassandra hovering over him and straddling his hip, hands on his wrists. “I’m thinking about a special device that you could wear. You would look so lovely, ready for me, stretched out for me at all times. I’m still working out the details, but it will be magnificent.

“I’m waiting until you become completely mine, my darling. I can show you what it is like to be loved.” Cassandra said, eyes glinting. “I can be very patient and good to you.”

Jizabel thought, for a moment, that it would be nice to be loved, even by Cassandra, but his limbs were not his own, and his head was not his own, and he surrendered to Cassandra’s will, wishing that he could close his hands around that bulging throat and squeeze until Cassandra is empty of words.

* * *

The Hermit is a wizened old man, shrunken and stooped and faded of all coloring. In that last sense, they are not too dissimilar.

“Thank you for coming, Dr. Zenopia,” Jizabel had said when they were scrubbing in together. His hair had been pulled back in a thick single braid by Chase, who turned out to have been surprisingly proficient at the task. Through the glass, he could see the two bodies laid side by side. If he were a more pragmatic kind of surgeon, he would have divided up the task of opening the skulls between himself and Zenopia. But Angels of Death were not pragmatic. They were vindictive, and vengeful, and sentimental, and he wanted his scalpel, his saw, to take life from Cassandra and bestow it upon his chosen faithful.

“Of course, it is a pleasure. I must admit, I was surprised—pleasantly so, when you called. I did not think I would hear from you again. It was a short drive, in any case. I simply could not pass up this opportunity.” Zenopia said, tilting his head and following Jizabel’s gaze to the operating theater. “Which one will you start with?”

“The recipient. That is, Cassian.” It was a little funny, referring to Cassian as the recipient, when it was Cassandra’s body that would receive a new inhabitant, should all go well. 

Zenopia studied him curiously. “I did not think you had kept in contact with the Hierophant, after all these years. I did not get the sense that you would be… fond of him, after the initiation. And so long after Delilah went underground, too.” 

“Hm. Our paths crossed rather… fortuitously,” Jizabel said. “In any case, the surgery. Do you think this can really be done?” He rubbed his hands vigorously, almost violently, more cautious than he had ever been. This was likely to be his career-defining surgery. He could not fail. 

He was resolute that this was the only thing on his mind. 

“I don’t see why not. Just because it has not been done before does not preclude its possibility. You are a skilled surgeon, and your, ah, specialized training should serve you well.” Zenopia finished scrubbing before him and headed out of the preparation area. “Good luck, Dr. Disraeli. I’ll see you soon in there.”

“Dr. Zenopia, wait,” Jizabel called out. Zenopia paused in his tracks, looked back, hands raised in the air, a bit of impatience showing through in the lift of his thick eyebrows. “Gladstone, before he died, said something to me. About the initiation. Prior to that, I had no recollection of it.”

Zenopia appeared to consider this fact. Finally, he said simply, “The Head Priest was an accomplished hypnotist. If I recall correctly, he was also involved in the research of mind-altering substances in Delilah. The creation of false memories, or suppression of memories, or personality-splitting. Of course, all of his research likely died with him, unless you can find where he kept his records.”

As Zenopia entered the operating theater, Jizabel let out a shuddering breath. He remembered the low, even cadence of Cassandra’s voice, spooned behind him in bed, the rhythmic stroking of the sensitive skin at the small of his back. What was real and what was a false memory? Cassandra tearing into his mind, tearing into his body, Cassandra cradling him fondly or kissing him with the gentleness of a saint. He thought of the bath, how Cassandra was haloed in orange light through the haze of water.

Of course, there was no guarantee that Cassandra was even successful at his research. For all Jizabel knew, the Head Priest had spent his entire tenure in Delilah whiling away his time in bars and clubs.

In a way, this was already a victory. Cassandra, on his operating table, already dead, body ready to be desecrated to his will, as Cassandra had desecrated him. And how his father would react, had he known that his Hierophant, whom he allowed to violate and humiliate his eldest son in front of the entirety of Delilah’s upper echelon, would inevitably succumb to Death, his last ritual wrung from him without his consent. He felt a strange sense of satisfaction, of vengeance accomplished.

And there was Cassian. Emotions warred within him; for all that he knew Cassian’s motives for getting close to him were essentially insurance for the success of this brain transplant, Cassian had been… kind. Cassian had come to his aid, likely having seen the confrontation from his hospital room window, and risked his life for Jizabel. It would defeat the purpose of buying Jizabel’s trust, being dead. Maybe it was true, that infatuation was a powerful motivator. There had been moments between them, soft moments, when he could pretend they were just two normal, oblivious people dancing around each other in innocent courtship. He remembered the unkind things he had said to Cassian, mere moments before Cassian quite literally took a bullet for him, and felt a hot stab of something he could not name. 

When Cassandra pulled the trigger, Jizabel froze. He wondered if he was truly ready to die, but his body would not move, and so likely it was. He remembered how Cassandra had stopped him from drowning, deciding when and where to take from Jizabel what he wanted. At least this once, they had the same goal. He had closed his eyes, waiting for the bullet to strike and bring him to oblivion, where Father awaited. And it hurt, violently, when a blur of movement knocked him aside, and the sound of gunfire and grunts of pain rang, and it had occurred to him that he was not dead, the bullet had not struck him, and the sounds did not come from him.

Cassian collapsed in front of him, eyes wide with shock, hands clutching his chest. Red bloomed on his hospital gown and seeped out from the crevices of his fingers, a wild rose in the snow. Red was all Jizabel could see, and across from him, Cassandra cocked the gun a second time.

His mind whirled. There were roughly a million ways he could lash out, end Cassandra’s life, but only a few that were immediately available and minimize the chance of being thrown in prison for life for murder. He could not resort to fisticuff, not without injuring himself. If he attacked Cassandra, fatally, with the scalpel his only weapon, it would too easily be traced back to him. The small cut on the back, a mere surface wound meant to stun, could be easily overlooked if the main injury were somewhere much more obvious. And if Cassandra and Cassian share compatible blood types… He knew it was a wildly mad, risky calculation, but something deep in his gut told him that it would be worth the gamble. And if so, then he would not be able to use Cassandra’s gun against him, even if all his instincts scream out to put a bullet between the other man’s eyes and end this accursed standoff. 

As High Priest, Cassandra had never had to get his hands dirty, but Death did not get his name performing baptisms.

Several things happened at once. The gun went off. Cassandra’s face contorted in shock, his body falling backward and crashing into the bench, the gun sliding bonelessly out of his hand. Jizabel’s entire body weight lunged into him, straddling Cassandra in a reversal of their bedroom play, the force of his feet grounding down on each of Cassandra’s hands. Enraged, Cassandra growled, shifted and attempted to toss Jizabel aside by thrusting his hip forward, but the move was belated; Jizabel’s elbow decisively struck his solar plexus and knocked the air out of Cassandra’s lungs in a hollow gasp. And then, taking advantage of that crucial moment, Jizabel grasped Cassandra’s head from both sides, taking in Cassandra’s startled wide eyes and parted mouth, and slammed it against the granite bench.

Cassandra’s body went still. For good measure, Jizabel repeated the movement twice more, each time bringing the lolling head up higher and shoving it down with more force. He stopped himself from a fourth slam and placed his ear on Cassandra’s chest. _Thump_.

The sounds of the night came alive. Cassian made a gurgling sort of noise behind him. In his bloodlust, Jizabel had almost forgotten the circumstances that had led them here. Letting Cassandra’s still body sag against the bench, Jizabel dashed toward Cassian, noticing with dismay that the blood had colored the entirety of his gown red. 

“I… d-didn’t know… you could do that,” Cassian gasped, baring his teeth in a bloody grin. “That was… feral.”

Sliding onto his hands and knees, Jizabel hovered over Cassian, searching for the entry wound on his chest. Cassian’s breathing was shallow, his face pale. Based on what he saw of the hole on Cassian’s chest and the spluttery, bloody breaths that Cassian struggled to take, he was almost certain that the bullet had pierced through a lung. 

“This wound can be fatal if it’s not treated,” he muttered. “We need to get you back to the hospital. Why did you push me, Cassian?”

“You were... trying to t-throw your life away,” Cassian replied with effort, punctuating each word with more bloody spit. “I told you. You always die, in my dreams. I told you I would protect you.

“Maybe don’t try to talk for now,” Jizabel said, gentler than he thought he could be. “I’ll call for a stretcher. You’ll be OK.”

“You have to get out, Jizabel,” Cassian murmured, eyes slipping close. “Escape from your father’s clutches. From Delilah.”

“Delilah is gone. My father is gone,” Jizabel insisted, shaking his head. _Cassandra is gone, too._ He sent a page to the team. They needed to get Cassian to an OR, immediately. 

“Not for you.” Cassian grunted. 

Cassian is right. “It is not that I can’t escape. I… don’t want to escape,” he admitted, voicing the thought aloud for the first time, savoring the way his heart clenched. “I am in the palm of his hand, no matter what he did to me, no matter where he is now. Every part of my body and soul belongs to him.”

Cassian chuckled mirthlessly, lifting a bloody hand to Jizabel’s face and tracing a lock of his loose hair. “I… understand. That’s too bad. But if… there’s ever a time when you want to get out of that black cage… then… don’t hesitate to… call me.” He choked, his whole body convulsing. “After all, you don’t know how to do anything on your own. You’re still just… a boy.”

Cassian fell silent, the movement of his chest stilling. Jizabel carefully gathered the small body into his arms, inhaling the scent of fresh blood and gunpowder. 

“It is not time for you to go yet, Cassian.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Playing a little with nonlinear, nested narrative for this chapter. I hope it's not too confusing. I think I wrote this chapter while high on sleep deprivation. 
> 
> Certain dialogues lifted straight from the manga because sometimes I pretend to respect canon.


	5. it is stories that build cathedrals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Imagine having House as your boss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot of cursed imagery in this chapter!
> 
> Some content warning for drug use, alcohol use, House, sex work shaming, and brief mentions of not-fun consensual sex.

Against all odds, Cassian wakes up. 

* * *

The break room is empty, save for House, who balances on the edge of a tipped back chair. Jizabel almost hopes he will succumb to gravity and smacks his head on the floor.

“You bastard, you really did it!” House booms, jovial for the first time since Jizabel started working for him. He throws a pen at Jizabel, and it falls to the floor harmlessly. “Damn. I meant that to be a prize.”

“If you doubted me, you shouldn’t have let me do it,” Jizabel huffs, professional pride wounded. 

House wags his cane at him. “Hey princess, Freud called. He wants his ego back.” The joke isn’t even that funny, but House guffaws. Jizabel’s face is stony. He thinks of the last time someone had called him  _ princess _ .

“Given that I’ve worked so hard and produced a medical miracle,” he says, “I think I’m entitled to take two weeks of paid leave.”

“Two weeks?” House yelps. “And leave me here with the rest of the idiots?”

“You and  _ the team _ ,” Jizabel emphasizes meaningfully, “can take care of the department. You’ve been doing just fine before I came along. I need a break. It takes a lot of effort to make medical history.”

“Alright, alright,” House says, already seeming bored. “Take whatever you need. Make sure your progress notes are up to date before you go. And maybe write this up as a case study on your vacation.”

“You Americans don’t take enough time off,” he retorts and doesn’t stop the door from slamming on his way out. He indeed will write it up; it is his paper, his case, but the timeline will be his call and not House's.

It is astonishing how easy it is to get away with murder with a sweet face, a medical degree, and the total lack of street surveillance at strategic locations. He had taken his long term patient out for a stroll. His neighbor, with whom he was on excellent terms as attested to by the neighbor’s own mother, coincidentally crossed their path, and as they were exchanging greetings, they were approached by a gang of dangerous men who wanted to relieve them of their valuables. A struggle ensued. He was lucky to get away with his life, due to the courage of his heroic neighbor who fought the thieves and paid a martyr’s price. His patient, however, was caught in the crossfire. And thanks to the generosity of his neighbor, his patient would now be saved. And now, Cassandra Gladstone will forever be preserved in the annals of medical history, a credit to his bravery and dedication to serve. 

It sickens Jizabel to tell the story and lionize that monster, and so he refuses to repeat it, claiming trauma. And yet, he thinks it a small price to pay for a chance of repaying Cassian for what he has done for him.

After Zenopia had sutured the last bits of flesh and skin closed on Cassian’s new skull, Jizabel allegedly collapsed bonelessly to the floor, every bit of adrenaline leaving his body in one fell swoop. Allegedly, according to the melodramatic retelling of Chase, who may have used the word “swooned” while backing up slowly from an enraged Jizabel. He did not remember much of what happened afterwards, nor did he have any memories of how he was transported to a hospital bed of his own.  _ Exhaustion _ , Foreman said disapprovingly when he awakened,  _ and severe dehydration _ . Despite the encouragement of his team to switch out and take a break during that neverending surgery session, heedless of the reassurances of Zenopia that he could take over for a little while, Jizabel applied himself with a boneheaded kind of devotion to the tenuous task of connecting each nerve, each blood vessel, diving into that glittering network he sees in his mind with absolute focus. He had decided that Cassian’s eyes should remain his own, and the mission of repairing the optic nerves, cradling Cassian’s eyeballs in his hand, occupied his entire being. 

It had felt… good, in that room, the focus, the excitement of discovery. He had felt the same way once upon a time, involved in research in Delilah’s laboratory. The routine surgeries he has been performing tap into the visceral pleasure of blood and flesh, but he knows they lack any intellectual stimulation. But this operation also felt different, better than his ill-fated experiments, knowing that what he was doing this time was in the service of life rather than the death and destruction that his father had commanded, that for once his own agency directed the work. It felt harder, too, knowing the stakes of his failure, not daring to admit that the body beneath his scalpel may possibly mean more to him than any patient or experiment ever did. 

When he woke up in that hospital bed, it was with a great, shuddering gasp, his right hand still curled, cramped, around an imaginary scalpel. The starlight of Cassian’s neural network still shone, emblazoned on the inside of his eyelids. It took Cameron forcibly pressing him back into bed and threatening him with a Benadryl before he quieted and let the team fuss over him. Zenopia, apparently, had already departed for his own research facility in Vermont, leaving only a message to alert him should the surgery succeed. _ If not, don’t bother, _ Jizabel hears the implied message. He had always liked the Hermit and his singular commitment to science.

His threats worked best on Cameron, who warily and reluctantly allowed him to stagger, with an IV stand, to the ICU to see Cassian. The room was stark white and, if possible, more austere than his former suite, encased in glass and filled with machinery to keep the worst at bay. Cassian, or whoever was in that body, showed some minor reflexes to touch, which was a sign that  _ something _ had gone right, although they did not know just how right. Cameron said that it would take at least several days for him to show any sign of consciousness, once the medical coma was terminated.  _ If he wakes up at all,  _ went the unspoken words, but neither of them needed to hear the words aloud.

Jizabel discharged himself that night, claiming that he would get a better night sleep in his own bed and recover well enough to come back to work the next day. Cameron’s pinched expression indicated her disapproval, but she is not his boss, and his boss only regarded him calculatingly for a minute, nodded, and limped out of the room. He silently thanked House, gathered his things, and stood outside Cassian’s ICU glass pod, counting the rise and fall of Cassian’s chest along with the machine.

Cassian really did protect him, as he had set out to do. A virtual stranger, willingly giving his life so that Jizabel may keep his. Others had given him life before, but their lives were forced from them, forced into him. Cassian gave himself up as a sacrifice, and as he cradled that bleeding, dying body, willing what warmth existed in his body to heat up Cassian, he wondered if this is how gods felt when they accepted their offerings.

_ I want to trust you, _ Jizabel thought helplessly.  _ But I’m not right. I don’t think I know how to be. _

His father’s voice came to him.  _ You can’t trust him. There is no reason to trust him. I told you before, there is no such thing as unconditional love.  _

Jizabel clutched the black crucifix through his white coat. It burned. Father was here.  _ Father _ would never abandon him.

_ You can’t get rid of me that easily, either, my darling,  _ Cassandra’s voice joined in.  _ I don’t think you even want to. _

He drowned them out. It was easy with alcohol-fueled fitful dreamless sleep and the white noise of the hospital and the obsessive monitoring of that unconscious body in the ICU. Three days of relative normalcy as he floated through the motions of the clinic, given the lightest load and simplest cases, coddled by all who knew him. Random nurses piled him with cookies that he did not touch. The story of his tragic  _ swooning _ had made its way around. 

And then Cassian woke up.

* * *

Father and Mother had a wicked sense of humor because they named him after a whore. He takes some comfort in that she was a  _ famous  _ whore.

He’s in a club, and the stench of unwashed bodies overwhelms him. He feels his lungs constrict and thinks about his sister, who was not a whore, famous or not. How ashamed his sisters must be, reincarnated into this body. All that he is, they are.

And like their mother, they do not hesitate to offer up their body for the whims of another man.

Tonight, he is wearing pleather, which he purchased as a passing fancy. His ass is perk in the constraints of shiny black plastic, and he knows he must look a sight. His eyes are smoked out, his glasses replaced by contacts, and the contrast with his hollowed, pallid face is exquisite. His hair falls in a tumble down to his hips, a little stringy and lacking in luster compared to his previous standards, but still show-stopping in its length and incongruous color. The long period of relative starvation has chiseled out sharp ridges on his hips, which he shows off lewdly with a shirt so obscenely short that it barely touches his navel. His stomach is concave with hunger, and he thinks he will fill it with semen tonight. 

Evidently, so do other people. He has been approached by no fewer than six people tonight, men and women alike, and he considers them briefly before rejecting them with a wave of his hand. He doesn’t know what he wants tonight. People make him sick, but for almost the first time in his life he craves the contact, the warmth trickling down his thighs, the rough hands on his ass. He craves  _ Cassandra _ . He feels sick at himself, remembering the translucent goop of Cassandra’s brain in his hands. A whole human, condensed into a block weighing only a few pounds at most.

Through his latex gloves, he could feel the warmth that was so uniquely Cassandra, heat that only knew how to devour. He imagined that it might have been the other man’s soul.

He had placed it in a stainless steel surgical bowl, and his assistant had hurried away with it, probably to be discarded as bio waste.

It is as if Cassandra’s death had unearthed memories that were best forgotten. But Cassandra was not interred, will not be interred, and the empty grave where his body should be reveals only what Jizabel had chosen to forget. 

Cassandra’s breath is hot in his ear.  _ You look exactly like your mother. I can see why your father doesn’t want your face to become blemished.  _ Cassandra, who fancied himself the Cardmaster to herald in another era of Delilah, had selected the perfect docile doll to be at his side. But Cassandra was not his father, yielded no power as his father had, and Jizabel is every bit his father’s monster as he is his mother’s son.

His mother’s eyes, his mother’s face, his mother’s hair and petite build, his mother’s name and his mother’s weaknesses. His mother, whose delusion of love allowed her to sell her children, trading their lives so that she could spend hers in a lie. He wants her to see him now, wondering if she would be proud. After all, he is only fulfilling the destiny that she had chosen for him.

He chooses a man, later that night, one with brown hair and a tall build and an arrogant smile. He lets the man fuck him hard in a bathroom stall, barely remembering to slip on protection, and screams when the man slams his head against the stall door.  _ More _ , he thinks, and says so. The man obliges, and he blacks out, the man’s cock still deep within him. 

When he comes to, he is alone, and his pants are torn. The mingled scent of various bodily fluids assaults his nose, and he knows that this is precisely what he deserves. This will seal his condemnation to the lowest levels of Hell, and maybe there, he will see Father at last. His only regret is the relative difficulty of hiding a trail of dead bodies in his wake, and his scalpel burns untouched in the tuck of his boots, and he merely fantasizes about the looks on their nameless faces as he disembowels them while they are buried to the hilt inside him.

He sucks off two more men that night, and he holds onto their warmth, feeling their abhorrent seeds burning through his innards, and imagines that this is love.

* * *

It turns out that there is much one can do when one does not have to report to work in the morning. Jizabel becomes a regular at several clubs, sometimes coming in and out of one more than once per night. There is a type he is looking for, but he is not too discriminate in taste. Mostly, he looks for the ones who seem most likely to yank his hair, hard, as he works on sucking them off. He looks for the ones who can make him see stars, who slap him until he cries, who fill his mouth with cock and semen and laugh when he chokes. 

After that first night, he decides to draw the line at anal sex. Somewhere deep inside, he has just enough sense to not be as self-destructive as to have unprotected sex with seven strangers in one night.

Every night is the same. He lines his eyes with kohl, braids his hair or lets it hang loose, and wears the tightest, shortest semi-clean thing he can find in his closet. Laundry has not been high on the priority list recently, but they don’t mind, not when they are rutting like rabbits in a dirty, piss-filled bathroom or a dirty, piss-filled alleyway. 

On some nights, he lets them slip him whatever tablet they please, and he makes a show of letting it dissolve on his tongue before lasciviously winking, taking their hand and leading them to a dark corner. He is pure instinct on those nights, and he likes best when the only thing he can hear in his head is his own groans, watching his head bob up and down through blinders, feeling their hands on him muted as if all of the skin on his body has fallen asleep. He lets them call him indecent names, lets them pinch his waist and bite his nipples and claw at his back. He hopes they will cover up every single mark his father and Cassandra had left on him, but the new marks always fade by the next day, and so he keeps coming back, asking for more, wishing to be cleansed and dirtied anew, hoping to find salvation in the fluids of a stranger. 

He stays out as long as he possibly can, until the sun rises and his body physically collapses, no strings to hold him up. His sleep is fueled by alcohol and drugs, and he knows that he will be jolted awake shortly drifting off by the alcohol metabolizing through his system. This is exactly the purpose. The less he can sleep, the better. The fitful hours he gets are blessedly shallow and dreamless, and he claws his way to consciousness before the sun is high on the sky, and the nightmares are guaranteed to be at bay. He pumps himself full of coffee throughout the day, staring hollow-eyed at the TV screen, and gets ready again when the day turns into night. He thinks this is a routine he can really get used to, for forever. He thinks about handing in his resignation officially. 

He very resolutely does not think about Cassian waking up alone in the hospital in a different body. He does not think of Cassian wearing the High Priest’s face, does not think of what it means for them, for him. He has performed a miracle and fulfilled Cassian’s greatest wish. His travails are finished.

But the men in the clubs. The men are always the same, even as they vary in age, ethnicity, or build. Jizabel never gives his name, and he doesn’t let them kiss him. They always buy him drinks as some kind of upfront payment. He finds it amusing that he is not even as good a whore as his namesake to be able to make a living from it. 

He is  _ just _ self-destructive enough to drink what they buy, heedless of the worst. And thus far, he has been lucky enough to not wake up dazed with his pants around his ankles in a parking lot. But he is not as lucky to escape the killer hangovers that follow him perpetually these days. Especially not when it is 9 AM in the morning, and his phone is ringing. It rings again, and again, even after he has swiped Cancel. Groaning, he swipes to pick up the call. 

“Come back to work,” House demands over the phone unceremoniously. “It’s been three weeks, not two. We need you back here. Foreman is driving me nuts.” 

Jizabel has him on speakerphone. He can’t quite find the strength to hold the phone up to his ear. “I’m not ready. I need more time.” House’s voice grates on him, sharp needles on his skin. He groans.

“You’ve had THREE WEEKS,” House yells into the phone, likely bringing it closer to his face. The volume gets exponentially louder. “Your patient is awake and asking for the incredibly talented surgeon who saved his life. What kind of heartless creep are you, anyway? You haven’t shown up to check on him even once. And if you’re ill, maybe  _ go to the hospital _ . I heard there’s a good one here called Princeton-Plainsboro.”

“It would defeat the purpose of taking a vacation if I have to come into work,” Jizabel deadpans and hangs up. 

He staggers his way to the bathroom, expels the watery content of his stomach, and curls up on the bathroom rug, shivering.

* * *

It was not altogether true, what he said to House before. He did sneak in to check on Cassian, once, after Cassian woke up the first time, before he asked for the leave of absence. It was a brief awakening, and by the time Jizabel had made his way to the ICU, Cassian had already fallen back asleep.

Cassian’s head was haloed by a ring of stitches, which could easily be hidden by his hairline should he choose, when it grew out, and provided that male pattern baldness was not in the cards for Cassandra’s DNA. Deprived of the styled brown locks, the face did not, in particular, resemble what Jizabel remembered of Cassandra. He thought it may even be possible for him to learn Cassian’s new face, given time, and fervently wished that Cassian would choose a different hairstyle to help him along.

The body was another matter. He knew it well, clothed and naked, knew the curvature of the spine and the dipping of the navel, of the most intimate secrets it contained that Cassian himself was not even aware of yet. With revulsion, he wondered if the memories of his own body were contained within that still frame, if those fingers still knew where to seek out his pleasure and shame. 

He reminded himself that Cassandra was dead, but it was hard to believe his own lies when he could see that body lying there, chest swaying with breaths, and thought hopelessly that he had created his own revenant.

* * *

He wakes one day to poundings at his door. The smell of sex and booze clings to him, and his whole bed reeks of it. He is loath to bury his head beneath the cover and inhale the wretched scent, but the incessant noise coming from his front door gives him no other choice.

His throat is parched. He wants water, but the kitchen and the bathroom are both far away, and he has a nagging suspicion that should he make his way to the bathroom, he is more likely to expel what little liquid remains in his system than to take any in. He curls deeper into the cocoon he has created, willing the smell to disappear and wishing for sleep to take him back for at least a little while longer.

The door clicks open. Jizabel stiffens. There is absolutely no one who has a spare key, that he knows for a fact. He thinks back to last night and wonders if, in his drug-filled stupor, he has forgotten to fasten the lock on the door. 

There is little in the room that can be used as a weapon. Suppressing a groan, Jizabel throws the cover off his head, crawls out of bed in the tight pleather trousers he had somehow slept in, and unplugs the lamp from its socket, turning it upside down and raising it in front of him as he cautiously opens the bedroom door. His flat is dim, as the curtains have remained closed for the better part of the past month. There is a shadow approaching the kitchen from the entrance. He squints.

“House?” Jizabel wonders aloud, incredulous. 

His boss stands in front of him, cane flicking at the dirty clothes discarded on the floor, and makes a sound of disgust. “I didn’t peg you for someone who lives like this,” House drawls, dangling an entirely too short black top at the end of his cane in Jizabel’s direction. “So this is how you’re spending your convalescence?”

“I’m not sick,” Jizabel mutters, kicking the clothing into a pile behind his couch and setting the lamp down besides the pile. “But… can you speak less loudly?” House raises an eyebrow. 

“I can still see them,” House says slowly, as if speaking to a three-year-old. “I have the-o-ry of mind.” 

Jizabel plops himself down on the couch, pulling his hair to one side and squinting up at House. “How did you even get in?” 

House spreads his hands in the universal sign of “Oops,” and says, “I have an advanced degree in breaking and entering.” Without waiting for an invitation, he limps his way to the kitchen, casually throwing open every cabinet door. “Got any water?” 

“The glasses are in the cabinet above the sink,” Jizabel grumbles, finding a cushion to place protectively in front of him. It is certainly not ideal to have his boss in his home in the best of circumstances, and he can hardly describe this as an even “OK” circumstance. “Just make yourself at home, why don’t you.” 

“OK, thanks, I will!” House calls back cheerfully. A few moments later, he returns, holding a glass of water in one hand and placing it on the coffee table in front of Jizabel. “Drink up, Buttercup.” 

Jizabel eyes the glass warily. “Thank you… for your… hospitality?” he says, skeptical, and pointedly does not pick it up. 

House takes a small packet out of his pocket, maintains eye contact with Jizabel, and makes a show of pouring it into the glass. The powder is orange and fizzles. “Electrolyte,” House explains, nudging Jizabel to take the glass. “I can smell the booze all the way from the front door. You’re looking particularly un-princessy today.”

_ That’s kind of the point,  _ Jizabel bitterly thinks. He would maintain a staring contest with House over the drink, but what little light there is in the room hurts his eyes. Sighing, he picks up the glass and sips on the orange drink, the sour taste washing away the film of disturbed sleep in his mouth. As the liquid slides down his throat, his stomach makes an embarrassing sound. He empties the glass, sets it back on the table, and hugs his pillow tighter against his chest. “Why did you break into my flat?” he mumbles blearily, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. 

“Truancy!” House cries triumphantly, prompting Jizabel to squeeze his eyes tighter as a headache manifests between his temples. “I told you, vacation time is over. We’re not a daycare, you know. People are  _ dying _ .” 

“I’m pretty sure people are dying anyway, everywhere,” Jizabel snaps. “Can you… lower your voice?”

If anything, House sees it fit to inject another dose of brightness into his tone. “Oh, I’m sorry! It must be very PAINFUL to hear LOUD NOISES when you have a HANGOVER.” He punctuates each word, watching with vague amusement as Jizabel shrinks into himself. When he speaks next, the volume is indeed lower. “I didn’t take you for a drunk when I hired you. Want to tell me what’s going on?”

“Not in particular,” Jizabel says, looking away. He catches sight of himself in the decorative mirror hanging behind the fig tree across the room. God. The eyeliner that he applied last night is smeared in watery streaks around his eyes, as if he has been crying all night. The outfit he had chosen is… lewd, to say the least, and completely inappropriate for an audience with anyone who may see him at work. His hair looks stringy, pale and plastered against his head, as if it has been weighed down by days worth of scalp oil. In a way, it pleases him that his physical self truly reflects the ugliness that always lies within. Still, there is enough sense left in him, untouched by the alcohol and the hangover, to feel just a little self-conscious to be presenting this side of himself to House.

House follows his gaze, settles onto the mirror, and says, “Yeah, I wanted to ask about the Avril Lavigne look, too. Think you’ll want to come to work one day like that? I would pay good money to see how Cuddy reacts. Like at least 100 bucks.” House gestures to his ensemble. “Where did you even get this outfit? Hot Topic?”

Jizabel groans, turning resolutely away. “I don’t know, I just ordered online from somewhere. Does it matter?” 

“I mean, far be it from me to criticize your fashion sense,” House starts, “but do you think it might be time to, oh, I don’t know, put a white coat over it and come back to work soon?”

He hasn’t seriously considered this yet, but before he can stop himself, Jizabel finds these words come out of his mouth. “I quit, House.”

House makes a wounded sound. “You can’t quit. I fire people. People don’t quit my team.”

Jizabel curls his upper lip in a smirk. “I’m pretty sure that everyone currently on your team has quit at least once.”

“But they always came back,” House insists. “Come on. Work is fun! We solve puzzles! I let you open people up and dig around inside! You even made medical history!”

Jizabel freezes. The reminder of Cassian has soured their light banter. House seems to sense something in Jizabel’s shuttered expression, and hums. “So it has to do with the miracle case, after all. I thought so. You look like any typical teenage girl who just got dumped by her high school crush. It’s why we don’t get involved with our patients, you know. Literally written in the ethics code.”

“We’re not involved,” Jizabel growls, glaring. 

“Maybe not in that way, YET,” House crows, “but there is clearly something going on. Any other doctor would have obsessively checked in on a case that may win them the Nobel’s in Medicine, but you haven’t as much as breathed a word about him since you closed him up.”

“Dr. Zenopia closed him up,” Jizabel insists emptily.

“Whatever, don’t care. Listen. Whatever your  _ problem _ with him is, it’s probably not going to solve itself by… I don’t know what you’re doing, it looks pretty fun actually… until it’s not anymore. I don’t say this often, or maybe ever, but you’re a good doctor and a better surgeon, and I don’t feel like strangling you every time I see you, so I see all of those as positives for someone on my team. I hate recruiting. So I’m telling you, get it figured out, come to work, check on Cass-what’s-his-face, and maybe sit down for an interview with the press. Cuddy’s been asking, and she won’t shut up. It’s driving me nuts.” House takes a long inhalation and continues. “Hey, I never pried into your stuff. People have the right to deal with whatever their demons are in private, but I don’t think you’re doing a particularly good job of doing that—I know, pot, kettle, blah blah, but at least I show up at work. Whatever it is that’s going on, if you can’t handle it on your own, you should at least tell someone who can help you figure it out.”

Stunned by House’s tirade, Jizabel can only blink and asks numbly, “And that someone is you?”

“I didn’t say that. I’m not signing up for that,” House protests. “I mean like, someone. Whom you pay.”

“So you’re telling me to go see a shrink,” Jizabel concludes dryly.

“I don’t think they like to be called that these days,” House warns, wiggling his finger for emphasis. “Go see a psychologist. Go see a psychiatrist. Go see a fucking crystal healer, even.”

Jizabel does not reply. House clears his throat and adds, “And what’s-his-face has been asking for you nonstop. He wakes up for longer periods now.”

Jizabel does not want to ask, but he does anyway. “How is he?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s healthy as a horse. Maybe he’s a zombie screaming for brains. Maybe his surgeon should go and see for himself.” House eyes him meaningfully. “You said there was nothing going on, but neither of us is stupid. And he doesn’t seem that stupid either. God, I can’t believe you’re making me say this, but he looks like he’s going to die of a literal broken heart every time his door opens and he sees it’s not you.” House makes a face. “It is really kind of pathetic in a… a really pathetic way. It’s really kind of gross.” 

It is, in fact, possible to feel more mortified and guilty than he already did. Jizabel groans and buries his head in the cushion. He will have to check to see if the kohl has transferred. It would be a pain to clean.

“So I can expect you at work tomorrow?” House asks, tone more serious. 

Jizabel sighs resignedly. For some reasons, he knew from the start that this is the only possible outcome for this conversation. “I don’t know. Maybe. No promises.”

House takes that as a yes. Jizabel decides that he will decide later, in earnest, knowing in his heart already what his decision will be.

But first, he has an appointment with his toilet bowl.

* * *

He does, somehow, manages to make it to work the next day. It is almost accidental how he rouses himself from the scant two hours of rest, for once unfueled by alcohol, and the sinking despair that settles into his chest as he sees dawn break over the skyline of Providence is almost a visit from an old friend. It is difficult to feel despair when one doesn’t feel much of anything at all but the pounding of flesh on flesh, the sound of music so loud that it seeps into one’s skin to replace feelings and emotions. Jizabel very much prefers it that way.

To say that House broke through to him is giving the old man entirely too much credit. It is the thought of Cassian’s confusion, and perhaps abandonment, noticed by others than himself, that urges him to move. As much as he despises the trappings of modernity, it seems the height of hedonism to feast on the literal scum of humanity and abandon the responsibility that he has unknowingly picked up along the way. When he brought Cassian back from the brink of death and granted him life anew, he had taken on the role of a progenitor. He is Frankenstein, responsible for his Monster, and responsible he must be before the enraged villagers come to set fire to it all.

No one in the hospital seems particularly surprised to see him back, although a few of the nurses give him brighter smiles than he ever remembers seeing on their faces. He checked his reflection in the mirror today, taking care to conceal the worst of the dark circles almost permanently staining the skin under his eyes, courtesy of the equivalence of three weeks of a Myrtle Beach spring break. He wonders if it is truly sufficient. He feels caged, hiding within his own body and wanting to hide his body, and he thinks that at least in this regard the white hospital coat has served its purpose. 

Cassian is, indeed, recovering quite nicely in the three weeks since his first awakening. His physical and cognitive therapies are progressing along well, and although his coordination is still a little off, he is making strides. His speech is growing more coherent by the day, Cameron had said when she handed him the file, and when they finally come face-to-face, Jizabel notices, with an entirely unexpected twinge of loss, that the speech comes in neither Cassian’s lilting boyish voice nor Cassandra’s deep baritone. The vocal cords are essential, but control of those instruments matters, too. It is Cassian’s new voice, now. 

And Cassian is determined to use that voice. 

“You… made it through.” The way Cassian’s eyes—and they are, truly, Cassian’s eyes—light up when Jizabel enters the room sends a little twitch of something undefinable through his skin. The words come out a little warbled, but intelligible enough. It almost makes Jizabel smile to see such great outcomes already, from the transplant. 

“And you,” Jizabel replies. He studies the stitches on Cassian’s bald head, seeing the beginning of dark strands pushing through the follicles. He thinks that this very strange feeling in his chest is quite naturally the result of seeing the miracle of the transplant. He really has done the unthinkable. 

His father would have been so very proud, now he is become Death. 

Cassian doesn’t ask too many questions about where Jizabel has been these past few weeks. A quick neuropsychological exam reveals that his perception of time and anterograde short-term memory are still off, and Jizabel quietly heaves a sigh of relief. He does not think he has the capacity to think of a suitable lie to tell Cassian. 

“You saved my life,” Cassian says slowly, calibrating the way each word feels in his new mouth. “You gave me… what I’ve always wanted.”

What he’s always wanted. Jizabel wonders if Cassian has always wanted to possess the body of so loathsome a man. But he supposes that whatever baggage he carries relative to Cassandra, Cassian has no knowledge of it. And yet, he still feels the low thrum of anger just beneath the surface, knowing that he could have ended all of this, let Cassandra’s body go along with his brain to wherever brains go after death, let Cassian bleed out on the ground of that park, and let himself be truly free of all that was Delilah. 

“Can I kiss you now?” 

“You’re still my patient.” Jizabel says, hushed, avoiding Cassian’s earnest, if opioid-glazed eyes. There are always shadows at the door. Cassian is the celebrity of the moment. 

“But not for long. Right?”

“You’re still my patient,” Jizabel repeats more firmly. He checks Cassian’s vitals again. Everything is as it should be. 

“When I’m discharged, then,” Cassian wheedles, smiling a little. “I’ve been waiting for a long time.”

_ I’ve been very patient, Jizabel,  _ he hears, in another voice, and shudders.  _ I’ve been waiting for you for a very, very long time. _

He shakes his head quickly. Whatever  _ talents _ or  _ gifts _ that Cassandra possessed that allowed him to tear into Jizabel’s mind, Jizabel is sure, faced with Cassian’s warm, kind eyes, have not been passed on through this body.

“Are you OK?” Cassian asks, concerned even as he is fighting sleep and the hefty dose of analgesic in his IV drip. Cassian is always determined to be worried over him when their positions imply anything but the necessity of doing so. He does not know why Cassian insists on all the fuss.

“Fine. A little chilly in here,” he lies easily. “I need to get to the clinic. I’ll come back and check in on you later. Get some rest.”

“You saved me. I think I might love you, Doctor,” Cassian whispers before his breathing slowly evens out, eyes falling shut.

When he is sure that Cassian has fallen asleep, Jizabel dims the light and slips out of the room, the feel of Cassandra’s hands hot on his hips. 

_ Jizabel, don’t be fooled, _ his father says.  _ The Devil is testing you. _

* * *

It is as if they go through their rehabilitations together, if apart. Jizabel thinks that Cassian may actually have done better at rehab than he has, if only because his rehab involves a rapid, dangerous detox and no medical care but what little he bothers to give himself. His body has been pushed to its limits, starved of sustenance and maintained with low-dose poison. Jizabel feels as if he has never discontinued his medications, hit with the full force of various organs groaning in protest of their mistreatments, and all this he feels ever more intensely in his body without the filter of the mood stabilizer on his system. 

They have a new diagnostic case today. A simple case of pneumonia in a 33-year-old Caucasian female, progressing quickly into the branches of the lungs and beyond, and the patient too young and recently healthy to warrant such poor prognosis. Recent travel history includes a spring break trip as a chaperone to Milan. Hardly a hotbed of infectious diseases. 

“It could be a novel kind of virus,” Cameron suggests, twirling a pen around her fingers.

Foreman raises an eyebrow. “I think we should be looking at horses, not zebras,” he says. “She may have some underlying conditions that exacerbated a simple flu. We’re still technically within flu season.”

“But it is unlikely, given her age and lack of anything remotely relevant in her medical history,” Chase counters, looking to Cameron and nodding to gesture his agreement.

House rolls his eyes. “Or maybe it’s  _ lupus _ ,” he says mockingly. “Princess, you’ve been quiet. What’s up, Ursula took your voice?”

It is not the first time that Jizabel has zoned out during one of the team meetings. Usually, it is because he simply dislikes these people, for all that they may be smarter than an average bear. It is not too difficult to work with people one dislikes; Jizabel has had a lifetime of experience, with Cain, with Delilah. But this time, it is not mere distaste for the company that prompts this particular bout of inattention. 

His stomach roils and churns in protest of the green smoothie he forced down his throat this morning on the way to the hospital. It is chilly in the room, but he feels as if his body is drowning in a wet sauna. What does he care if some woman is dying of pneumonia, or why? 

Feeling all eyes on him, he grits out, “I agree with Foreman,” if only to be contrarian. House knits his eyebrows in calculation.

“Alright, then,” House decides. “Two against two. Each of you, go run tests and come back with a definitive answer. No use guessing if no one is guessing correctly! I call lupus!”

As the team trickles out, House seems to change his mind and calls out. “Disraeli, hang back a moment.”

Jizabel resists the urge to roll his eyes if only because it would pain him more than it would annoy House to do so. “Yes?” 

House gives him a once-over. “Just looking at you gives me a headache.”

“Pardon?”

“If you’re going to insist on walking around looking like soggy leftover tacos, I’m pulling you off of the surgical rotation. Lab duty only.”   


“You can’t be serious. I’m literally your best surgeon.”

House scoffs. “I can’t even trust you with an autopsy at this point. Go do whatever it is you and Foreman are going to do, and then go home. Eat something, Get some sleep. I can’t have my doctors looking sicker than my patients.”

“I think this amounts to some kind of ADA violation,” Jizabel growls. “You’re the one who told me to come back to work.”

“I thought you would be able to take care of your shit,” House retorts. “Clearly I was wrong. There is a right way to be a functional mess, and you’re not doing it right now. I told you to talk to somebody.”

Jizabel hears the low grunts of anger grow into a dull roar. “You’re not my doctor. There is nothing to talk about with anyone,” he says icily. “If you keep trying to intimidate me and pry into my private life, I’ll file a complaint with HR. And a police report, too, for the breaking and entering.”

House’s eyes narrow, and he snorts. Turning away and limping back to his desk, he says, “Do what you want. You’re still banned from surgery.”

Jizabel wonders, then, exactly how difficult it would be to convince the police that House slipped and fell on a scalpel that just so happened to rip open his stomach and spill out the innards within.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Believe it or not, this was my attempt at levity.
> 
> Yes, Jizabel definitely owns concealer. I mean he owns eyeliner and pleather pants.
> 
> Next chapter is already written, but everything after that is still a WIP. I will try my best to stick to the roughly once a week update schedule.


	6. sorrow hides well in your shell

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object? Cassian is determined to find out, apparently. 

“I’ve made my intentions quite clear, Doctor,” Cassian says, his words still halting and ever so slightly off, “for a long time now. The least you can do is to tell me to go away. I will, if you ask me to.”

_ Go _ _,_ Jizabel thinks.  _ Don’t leave me _ _,_ another voice begs.

_ Jizabel, I told you to resist temptation. _

“Cassian, this infatuation… I don’t understand. I have given you what you most desired.” Jizabel looks out the window into the park across the street. They are back in Cassian’s old room outside of the ICU, and from here, Jizabel can see that fated park bench in perfect view. It is little wonder how Cassian knew to come to his aid. 

He feels fragile, unsure. He is turning this man away again, and he does not know how many times Cassian will come back.

_ The Devil is never idle.  _

Cassian regards him for a long moment. The thoughtfulness is foreign on Cassandra’s face. “I guess my priorities have changed in these past months,” he says quietly. “Or maybe they have only been clarified. There is something else I would trade almost anything for, even this body.”

Jizabel swallows hard. He knows what it is to be wanted, to be used and discarded. He thinks Cassian is talking about something altogether different, and that, he does not know how to handle. “How can you… care about… someone you know almost nothing about?”

_ You can’t. He lies.  _

“I thought you said I knew too much about you because I was a good stalker,” Cassian jokes, but the smile is strained. “I don’t think…  _ caring _ is about weighing everything about a person and deciding whether this person is worthy or not. It’s about taking a leap of faith, comes what may. I saw the spark of you, and that is enough for me.

“I told you once of what my tasks at Delilah were. It was not just to follow you. Of course that took up a significant part of it, but procurement was also required by many different arms within the organization. It is probably an understatement to say that I’ve seen the literal bowel of humanity.”

“Then you’ve seen what I have done, as well,” Jizabel points out. “I do not regret it.”

Cassian nods. “Perhaps so. And Justice, and the Tower, and the Moon, and most of the other Major Arcanas, I’ve watched them. All of you, masters of your own domain under the strings of another. 

“Even so, and call it what you will, and perhaps it is presumptuous, I felt a certain kind of kinship. You were different. Ah… I can’t seem to find my words.” Cassian chuckles apologetically. “Sorry. I’m trying. I wished I had the opportunity to get close to you instead of merely watching from afar. I… I… it is not pity, if that is what you think. I think it was whatever… good… left in me that felt so indignant for a young kid to suffer so under the eyes of so many, for him to act out his pain with such… ferocity, and all that loneliness I saw. It. It was very upsetting. I want to show you that you don’t have to be alone. To take care of you, do all the things I should have done and didn’t.”

Jizabel makes a disbelieving sound. “I do not need to be taken care of. You were under no obligation to do anything for someone you didn’t know.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Cassian replies, “but you don’t need something for it to be offered. And I can’t properly explain attraction. I just. Am.”

Cassandra had tried to take care of him, too, before he took care of that man instead.

“I’ll never really forgive you for the deception,” Jizabel says, his eyes blank of emotion.

“I deserve that.” Cassian nods in response. “I understand if you want me to just fuck off. But you haven’t told me that even now, so I’m asking… is there a part of you that thinks you may want this?”

Cassian is naive, but oh, Jizabel wants to trust in this innocence. 

_ I did not raise you to be so naive. I have taught you the ways of the world. _

“Will you not give it a try?” Cassian asks gently, hopelessly. Jizabel thinks of how a kicked puppy would look at its owner, desperately wanting a gentle word, a pet on the head, a bone, and already resigning to doing without. He sees himself gazing in adoration at his father, bent over a marble altar. 

_ Jizabel, only I love you. No one else can.  _

But Cassian knows the monster he is, and he is reaching through the slats of the cage just the same, trusting that Jizabel will not take his hand off in one bite.

Against his best judgment, ruled as always by emotions even as he pretends to be above them, Jizabel nods cautiously, and Cassian smiles, but Jizabel thinks there is something quiet and sad about it, the movement not quite reaching his eyes.

* * *

Cassian is well enough to leave the hospital now. He is discharged with great fanfare, accompanied by a horde of reporters and photographers. It’s a  _ big fucking deal _ , to borrow House’s colorful language. Jizabel should feel elated that he has done the impossible, has made medical history, but he only feels as if he had lost something precious the moment Cassian’s own eyelids closed for the very last time.

They haven’t figured out yet how this works. It is a skittish, feral kind of thing. Cassian, for his insistence in the beginning, surprisingly backs off. He never initiates physical contact, and Jizabel, for all those weeks of drowning in sins and all those hands he willingly had placed on him, shies away from Cassian when they see each other. Mostly, they talk. 

Cassian likes to text. Jizabel leaves most of the messages on “Read,” but they keep on coming with great frequency. They see each other occasionally, which they can legally do now that Cassian is no longer a patient under his direct care. Cassian attends regular physical rehab and weekly appointments with a therapist who specializes in post-transplant adjustment. Jizabel never asks how Cassian is getting used to this new body, the body of a man who tried to kill him upon first meeting, but he can see the uncertainty still in Cassian’s gestures, unused to the length of his limbs or the extend of his reach, of quickly averted eyes alternating with too-long stares when they pass by a mirror. In a way, it makes Jizabel feel just a bit less alone in his solitude, knowing that he is not the only one still reeling from the aftermath of Cassandra’s death, no matter how indirectly.

Sometimes, on the rare day when Jizabel isn’t at work, they sit together in the garden, taking up the exact space Cassandra had left open. To the garden, it is as if one Cassandra Gladstone had never left. Mrs. Gladstone moved away a long time ago, leaving the building under the care of hired help. Jizabel thinks that is for the best, as well.

Not for the first time, Jizabel realizes that he knows almost nothing about Cassian asides from his involvement with Delilah, and even on that subject, the details are thin. He does not know where Cassian works or lives prior to the extended hospitalization. He does not know about Cassian’s past, his family, what hurts him and what pleases him. He does not know whether Cassian has friends or coworkers, or hell, even how he managed to handle health insurance and billing for his operation. 

“I… Don’t laugh,” Cassian warns when he brings up the subject. “It’s kind of bad.”

Jizabel thinks of all the possibilities for Cassian’s employment. Real estate agent. Grocery bagger. Fitness instructor. Accountant. Petty thief. None of these sounds right, none of them fitting the image of the precocious, passionate young boy-man that was Cassian for all those years. 

Cassian hesitates. “I told you about the circus. That was before Delilah. I never wanted to get back to a place like that. It gets harder every year to be gawked at as some kind of… curiosity. Of course we don’t have  _ freak shows  _ anymore, but in some places, people don’t make a very clear distinction.

“I couldn’t really work in any kind of job where people could see me. It would just raise too many questions. I thought about being a phone operator, but that wasn’t really an option, either, with my voice. Only something through text or messages could work.”

Jizabel hazards a guess. “So… you worked in online customer service?”

Cassian grimaces. “I… contract for a private investigative firm. Anonymously. They did not ask too many questions as long as the work was done.”

A wan smile graces Jizabel’s face. “So you are a professional stalker, even now.”

Cassian rubs his eyes, a sheepish answering smile on his lips. “Yeah. It pays well, and I am good at it. I suppose now that everything has changed, I can find a new line of work, but I haven’t thought too much about it. I guess I’m kind of destined to lurk in the shadows and report on people whose lives are a lot more interesting than mine.”

It helps a little with the uncertainty, Jizabel thinks, the more Cassian opens up about his life, but it still isn’t enough. There are so many things about him that Cassian can’t even begin to imagine. He thinks this relationship, or whatever it is, is a sham. No love is unconditional. Cassian is with him because he saved Cassian. Cassian is with him because he believes Jizabel is salvageable. Cassian is with him because he is chasing some specter from his dreams. Cassian is with him because he has his mother’s face. There are always conditions attached to love, and he yearns to expose Cassian for his lies. But not yet. He wants to gorge himself on this love, fill every crevice of his being with it so that when it leaves, he can pull apart pieces of himself and bury his face in the residual warmth.

There is a chance that all that makes up Cassian is a lie. Jizabel thinks again of what Zenopia had said about Cassandra’s research. What is real and what is not real? What is manufactured and what is genuine?

The afternoon is muggy, the first blush of warm weather heading for this part of the world. Cassian pulls self-consciously at the beanie on his head, too thick for the mild weather they have been having. Jizabel thinks he understands what it is like to not want to display one’s scars for the world to see.

They make dinner, or rather Cassian makes dinner (“I don’t eat meat, Cassian”), moving too easily through his kitchen, and forces Jizabel to make a show of clearing at least half of his plate before he is allowed to leave the table. The food is simple and light, a quick vegetable stir fry over brown rice. Cassian is as motherhennish as ever, and yet, something is different this time, his requests sounding more like commands, his presence shaded with veiled threats. Jizabel knows that this is all in his head, that it is outlandish to compare Cassian to the former owner of his body, and yet.

They retreat to the couch after Jizabel loads the dishwasher and Cassian finishes wiping down the counter, their first attempt at domesticity. It is like wearing new shoes and walking two miles for the first time. Tentatively, Cassian draws him into his arms when it is clear Jizabel will not balk and disembowel him, and, placidly, Jizabel lays his head on Cassian’s broad shoulders, ice in his stomach. He had been here before, in this exact position, but the last time he was in these arms, their owner had ended up dead.

* * *

He finds an intruder in his home again when he returns from work one day. He undresses, tossing stiff trousers aside in favor of lighter garment, and settles on the casual yukata he received as a gift from one of Father’s trips to Japan. The first hint that awaits him when he emerges from his bedroom is the wide-opened screen door to the balcony. 

The second is the shape of Cain, lounging on his patio, dressed as if attending Wimbledon. They used to attend Wimbledon together, he and Cain and Mary and Father, when Father wanted to show off the pretense of family to London high society, and the thought aches somewhere deep in his chest.

“Hello, brother,” Cain says, sipping on a glass of scotch that he is clearly too young to drink, especially in this country. There is no scotch at Jizabel’s flat, or there has been no scotch, so he figures Riff must be somewhere near. Cain can’t have purchased the alcohol on his own.

“You killed him.” A shitty greeting, perhaps, but it is all he can think to say.

Silence meets his accusation.

“I hate airing our dirty laundry just as much as you do, Cain. I just want to hear you admit it. To me,” he continues without inflection. All of a sudden, the air seems scarce. 

Cain looks away.

Somewhere in the garden, a squirrel chases its mate, layers of fat already reabsorbed by the body after a long hibernation. The spring evening is cool and quiet, though the occasional breeze still burns bare skin with its icy breath. His yukata isn’t warm enough; he has forgone the inner layers traditionally worn beneath the thicker cover, trusting the lingering warmth of the afternoon to shield him from the darkness. 

Cain approaches and reaches out to touch his arm. He flinches away and quickly covers it up with anger, slapping Cain’s hand and rubbing at the offending spot where he was touched. “Jizabel…”

“Tell me.”

“Yes, I did it. I poisoned him. For me, for you, and for Mary.” The words come out of Cain in a rush. All of a sudden, he reminds Jizabel of the little boy of so long ago, before he became this haughty, confident young man. Little Cain, cowering in the garden behind the bushes, hiding from Father. Little Cain, who grew taller every time Jizabel saw him from afar, crouched behind the grand windows of the manor. Cain and Riff, as inseparable as he and his solitude.

He remembers squashing down the hatred he felt for that little boy, erecting a facade of an amiable half-sibling who visits, from time to time, between semesters spent overseas. Sometimes, he even pretended that they could grow to love each other, as his mother and father had loved each other, that he could stop himself from itching for his scalpel every time he saw Cain’s wide golden eyes. 

When he came into the service of his father’s organization, when he became  _ Death _ , he knew that those little boys would never be true brothers.

“Tell me again,” he breathes.

“I don’t have to explain myself. I know what he did to you. To me. And I couldn’t risk that one day he would do the same thing to Mary, or worse. You may have escaped his wrath, but we were there in that house…” 

Jizabel laughs, the sound like nails scraping against rocks. “No one ever escapes Father.” It is as if somebody has uncovered an old chest of memories that he had carefully stowed away in the attic and wiped off the spider webs. “He used to travel to Paris to see me, sometimes. And afterward, at the London headquarter.”

“And you just lied there and took it,” Cain says, disgust evident in his expression. “A grown man, still letting Father get his way. You are even more fucked up than I thought.”

How does he tell this righteous scion that in his twisted mind, every strike of the belt was an expression of love? At least he was heard. At least he was  _ seen _ . He knows that none of this makes sense to other people, but man strives to find meaning in a world that has none, and in the roaring madness of his father’s love, he has found his raison d’être. 

“How can you blame me for defending us when you never bothered to?” Cain shouts and abruptly stands. “You are the eldest. We were children-”

“Enough, Cain,” he hisses, drawing the yukata tighter around himself. The fabric, soft as it is, scratches against his dry skin. “He was our father. He had every right.”

Cain stares at him in disbelief. “No father has the right to whip his son bloody every night, Jizabel. How could you think that? Did you think,” he continues in a quiet tone, “did you think that we deserved it?”

Silence hangs again between them, pregnant and stilted. “Yes.” It isn’t the first time he has admitted this, but it is the first time that the recipient is not his father. “Someone who takes the lives of others to sustain his own deserves no less.”

“What do you mean?” Cain draws back, eyes narrowing.

Of course Cain doesn’t know. No one alive does anymore, except himself.

“You don’t know much about me, for all that you claim to be my brother,” he murmurs, a cold smile on his lips and a wild glint in his eyes. “My life was his to give.”

Cain looks as if he will be sick. “If you’re talking about the forced transplants… Yes, I know about those. I combed through Father’s notes. You’re talking about literal murders of children and highly illegal medical procedures. You’re defending someone who killed your own blood. You can’t seriously believe the lies that father had told you. He quite literally ran a crime syndicate and forced you into it. You were a child when all that happened. You had no autonomy-“

“We never really have autonomy, but we keep on sinning anyway.” Jizabel feels as if he is floating from high above, dispassionately watching the scene play out. The knowledge that  _ Cain knows _ stings, but the sensation is muted, as if it is the beginning of a sore that will only fester later. “But all those times I failed to kill you, I truly wanted to. And now,” he says, “we are the same. But you have killed the only person in the world who held any meaning to me, and I’ve always hated you.”

_ Even though I am nothing but livestock to Father. _

“Jizabel...” Cain’s face crumples in pain, and Jizabel feels a sick sort of satisfaction. “I already forgave you for what you did.”

“I never asked for your forgiveness,” Jizabel growls. “I want nothing from you but your suffering. I was allowed to live because my two older sisters and my best friend were forced to sacrifice their bloody flesh and their souls." 

_ Even now… they cry for release from within this body. _

“But you are perfect, Cain. You are a perfect copy of father. I was just a placeholder until you came.” That face, that hair, and those eyes. A true Hargreaves, just as he isn’t. And he yearns for it, as his mother’s blood yearns for everything that is Alexis, belongs to Alexis. He briefly wonders whether it is worse to want to kill his brother or kiss him until he draws out Cain’s essence, drains him of Hargreaves blood, leads him around with gouged eyes in their own version of Antigone. 

Cain’s face still looks as if he has been struck, and for that, Jizabel is glad.

“Cain.”

“Yes?”

“If I ever see you again, you can rest assured that I, of all people, know how to aim for the carotid artery.”

In the shadows, Cain’s face shutters, and Jizabel sees only his father’s disapproving stare.

Something comes to him, and he stops at the arch separating the living space from the kitchen. “Cain, wait,” he calls out, feeling oddly vulnerable, but he needs to know. “Tell me, was Mary here? Did she visit me?”  _ Was it real? _

Cain’s eyes on him are inscrutable. Finally, he takes out a small white card, places it on the railing, and says, “She did. But Jizabel, if you have to ask me that, then I think you need to come home. I’m in Boston for a week on business. Call me.”

Cain leaves, and Jizabel stands there until his legs threaten to give out under him. Eventually, he makes his way to the bathroom and draws a bath, the water icy from the tap. He slides in in his yukata, submerged completely under the surface, and as he lies shivering in his frozen pond, he remembers the last time the thought of drowning crossed his mind, and feels again the touch of those hands that had denied him oblivion. There will be none this time. 

He lets go.

When he emerges at last, gasping and spluttering, he thinks he can see the first stars rising in the evening sky, forming the shape of a lamb’s severed head. 

* * *

He is slacking at work. The nurses are the first to notice something is wrong, and the whispers grow louder as the shadows beneath his eyes darken. He hears the sounds, but sometimes he has trouble making out the words. He sees the concerned, frowning faces, dully recognizes the familiar cadence of hospital life, and he feels detached from it all. He barely registers the touch of his least-despised nurse on his shoulder and catches himself in places he does not remember walking to. He can’t concentrate. Clinic hours drag on, and his interactions with patients grow cavalier beyond the limits of acceptability. Even House can muster up more enthusiasm, Jizabel knows, but he can’t bring himself to do anything about it. 

They haven’t had a new diagnostic case in days, and the team is scattered across the clinic floor under Cuddy’s directives, which override House’s lab-only order. Their last patient has taken a turn for the worse and is now placed on a ventilator in the ICU. At least the lab results came in, and Cameron and Chase were vindicated, much to Jizabel’s disgust. A novel virus. How… utterly boring.

House is nowhere to be found, and no one mentions his absence. Jizabel wishes he could be similarly invisible, but he does his best at imitating being a real doctor for as long as he can. It’s not so difficult when one knows all the tricks and says all the right buzzwords. It is not as if the cases that come to the clinic are a matter of life and death. Sometimes, he sees the way Cuddy looks at him, her eyes clouded with pity. It is as if she knows that his hands shake too much and too often to be of any help in surgery, and he is almost grateful to only have clinic duties on his plate. 

His days start to bleed into the next. He wakes up screaming from a scant two hours of sleep, drowns himself in caffeine, pointedly avoids looking at his medicine cabinet, and wanders aimlessly to the hospital. Cassian texts him good morning. He checks in at work, grabs the charts, and starts rounding. Tells the patient to  _ breathe in, now breathe out _ , and listens to the whooshing of air and lungs and heart and runs algorithms in his head. Cassian texts him to remind him to get lunch.  _ Pneumonia _ .  _ Just a cold _ .  _ Are you sure you wouldn’t be better served in psychiatry _ ? This last one gets him an early dismissal for the day and a stern warning to  _ not come back until you can handle your temper again _ . Cassian texts him to ask about his day. He leaves as quietly as he has arrived, barely remembering to grab his coat before he braves the New England wind. The spring sun sets too late, giving him no cover of darkness in which to lick his wounds and skulk back home. 

When he passes Cassandra’s window, the lights are on, but he doesn’t hear the familiar voice calling his name. Something twists deep in his gut. He heard Mrs. Gladstone had rented out the flat to someone else already, and the new tenant moved in last week.

Moments later, he is in his flat again. Cassian texts him to ask if he would like to watch a movie. The wine slides down his throat and bypasses his taste buds completely, and the haze thickens around his head, and he is glad. 

* * *

The next day, there is a whirlwind of rage in his living room, and he has no idea how it managed to open the door. After the recent incidents, he should have called a locksmith and invested in a deadbolt for both the front and back doors.

“You smell like you robbed a liquor store.” Cassian sounds upset as he makes his way into the kitchen and rummages through the empty shelves in the fridge. Jizabel can only lie on the couch and follow Cassian’s figure, very far away and somehow distorted around the edges. “How many days has it been since the last time you ate?”

It is somehow Cassandra’s voice he hears. It’s Cassandra’s vocal cord, Cassandra’s breath. He can’t remember. What does it matter, anyway? It isn’t any of his concern what happens to that body of his.

“Jizabel, look at me.”

He can’t. There is nothing but fog in his vision, and Cassian’s face is barely a blur hidden behind deceit and lies. It’s all lies, a cover up, all of this. Pretending as if he cares.

“Doctor, please.”

He lifts his face up with no small amount of effort. The room is so bright. Cassian must have opened the curtains as he thunders around the apartment. Cassian’s face is a sea of light framed by darkness, and though the features are lost to him, he can still imagine the other’s lips set in a tense, upturned line. He sinks deeper into the couch, half willing his hands to stop trembling and half not caring. 

He just wants to sleep. Why won’t Cassian just let him sleep? And god, please, will these people stop coming into his home uninvited.

“Cass,” he mutters to himself. 

Fingers on his face, cupping his jaw and smoothing out his frayed, oversized braid. “I’m worried about you.”

He doesn’t know where his glasses have gone, and yet he reaches out for them. Not that they would make any difference, but at least they will help shield his eyes from Cassian’s intense gaze. 

Something hard presses into his hand, and he recoils. His glasses. Somehow, Cassian has found them. He shakily unfolds them and attempts to shove them onto his face, but the earpieces catch on his hair and the hinges make quick work of snatching loose strands into their traps. He adjusts his glasses as best he can and gives up, and unseen gentle hands straighten the frame for him of their own accord. He blinks blearily and looks into the face that frightens him, unable to reconcile the Cassian within with the face he now wears.

“Do you want some water?”

He nods, and immediately cool glass appears between his lips. He drinks too deeply and too fast, and water dribbles down his chin and a floodgate opens in his mouth, and he coughs painfully and messily. “Stop,” he croaks, weakly pushing away the glass and wishing his hair were unbound so that he could hide his face beneath its curtain. He thinks he hasn’t used his voice in days. “E-Enough. Please.” 

_ Darkling I listen; and, for many a time  _

_ I have been half in love with easeful Death,  _

_ Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,  _

_ To take into the air my quiet breath;  _

The lines of Keats’ poem come unbidden. Easeful Death. Does Death come for itself? Death has always eluded him even as it comes for others. For father, who waits there, with easeful Death, and it’s on the tip of Jizabel’s tongue, what he meant to say to father.  _ Away! away! for I will fly to thee.  _

Cassian shouldn’t be here. Not in his flat, and not when he’s like this. He has exposed himself far too much already; there is no reason for this still stranger to see his deterioration. Cassandra’s body is there with him, and Jizabel feels phantom cuffs around his wrists, a phantom cock buried deep within him. He rubs his wrists absently, leaning away from Cassian.

“How much did you drink, Jizabel? Did you take anything else with it?” Cassian scowls, but there is substantially less anger in his voice than Jizabel has expected.

He is trying his best to answer, but he can’t remember. “T-Two?” Good God, his voice is shot to hell and back, and he can’t stand this damned stuttering.

“Two drinks? Hell if you did. The truth, Jizabel.”

“Bottles.” And he would have had more, had he any more wine in the flat. Cassian doesn’t quite need that information, and he doesn’t volunteer it.

_ He just wants to control you. _

“Did you take anything else?” 

_ It is exactly the kind of thing Cassandra would do. Keep you under his leash. Allow you to breathe only the air he has chosen. _

Jizabel shakes his head, and his world spins rapidly out of control. He falls again even as he is prone, has been prone, and his stomach lurches dangerously with pure bile. A sound that can only be described as a whimper escapes his lips. He feels a large, cool hand on his forehead, and, against his wishes, he leans into the reprieve from his own inferno.

“You’re a mess.”

“But you knew that,” he agrees pleasantly, he thinks. What comes out may be more generously described as a noise rather than intelligible words. Cassian ruffles his hair and lifts his head onto a warm lap, and he falls asleep to a deep, exhausted sigh.


	7. as along came heartbeat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um I thought I posted this a long time ago but I didn't I'm sorry. 
> 
> Content warning for medical imagery and hospitalization, hallucinations, and way too many literary references.

Jizabel thinks he has given what people call love a fair try. Cassian’s version of love is a warm fire, but to a starving wolf that fire is a blazing inferno, a weapon against the protection of the darkness. 

Whatever their dynamic has been when Cassian was a patient under his care has only intensified. The constant nagging, the muttering, the little snide comments about his complete inability or avolition to take care of basic needs only intensify the longer Jizabel allows Cassian to be in his orbit. It is a low-dose version of Cassandra, less oily, perhaps, less suffocating, and so well-intentioned that Jizabel does not have ready retorts in mind whenever Cassian fixes that disapproving stare at him. Cassian falls into the familiarity of infrequent domestic life with such ease that Jizabel immediately decides he cannot trust someone who moves through the world with such unfettered comfort. That kind of world is not made for people like him.

At least with Cassandra, Jizabel knew where he stood. Cassandra wanted a doll, inanimate and pliant, something to dress and arrange and gaze upon in proud ownership. Cassian… he does not know what Cassian wants. A pet. A surrogate son. An ailing consumptive lover in a white dressing gown. Someone to feed, to protect, on whom to lavish affection. Cassian says he understands, seeks to understand, but Jizabel knows he doesn’t, and he can’t. The only one who possibly can is someone as tormented as himself, but the last time he saw Cain, his brother had seemed surprisingly well-adjusted, even after having lived through the same horror that is the Hargreaves family curse. It is just him, in the end, as it perhaps has always been. 

Cassian is trying his hardest to put together pieces of a shattered vase, and sooner or later, he will cut his fingers on the jagged edges and swear off the whole project. He does not understand that sometimes it is better to leave discarded things alone, to let them slowly fade away in peaceful oblivion, in respite from the outside world. 

They lie in bed, the space in between wide enough for another person, and Jizabel thinks it is fitting that it is so. The shade of Cassandra is expansive, in death as in life, never apologetic about taking up the space he thinks he is owed. 

It is a game they now play. Cassian reaches out with faltering fingers, and Jizabel shrinks back. Jizabel thinks that if he keeps shrinking, he may one day fit in Cassian’s palm, and perhaps that is what Cassian would like best. 

Cassian, to his credit, pursues and does not push. Jizabel thinks of how he has opened himself up so wantonly to those strangers in the night, and yet he cannot stand to be touched in this tentative thing they have between them. It is tender and warm, but he is a man brought in from the cold, and the warm water of the bath sends spikes of pain through his frozen flesh.

What has love brought into this world? His father’s love at once suffocates in its intensity and sparse in its display, yet he thinks he would gladly feast on its poisoned morsels for the rest of his life, dutifully doling out the doses and hoarding what he can of the physical marks it leaves behind. In the mirror, he sees the long-healed whip lines on his back. They are numerous and time-bleached into silvery white. It is easy to miss the symmetrical curved lines following the contours of his scapulas, older still and thinned to wisps. He thinks of his sister’s lungs on a steel surgical tray, inflated and pink like a great pair of folded wings, and feels his own lungs constrict. It is one of life’s great ironies that in taking her wings, he was left with the marks of the fallen on his back. He hopes that she, at least, flies with the angels.

Cassian had said, in so many words, that he is loved. It is not that he does not believe Cassian and his sincerity. He thinks Cassian meant for the confession to be a balm to Jizabel’s sickness, and Jizabel truly wants to believe that it is, but he also thinks he knows better than to believe in the myth that love is salvation. He has tried, for so many years, to believe that he would find salvation in his father’s smiles, in each painless touch, and yet, in the end, it is only pain that makes certain the existence of love. He knows it is love when his world narrows to the whims of one single person, when his every thought and action is an act of obedience to the beloved, when every scowl sends a hot stab of pain through his heart and every lash on his skin burns in relief. Affection and attention are easy substitutes for each other, and a starving man cares not for the poison within the wild fruit he finds. 

In many ways, Cassian is a child still, deprived of love and eager to wade in its depth, and does not understand that it is one of the great slow-acting poisons of existence. He thinks of Samson and Delilah, of the strong, proud man brought down because he dared to trust in another, of Delilah’s flippant betrayal of the man who loved her. And yet, Jizabel cannot find it in himself to blame Delilah. She never claimed to love Samson; it was he who fell for love, naive enough to trust in the deceit of eternal devotion. He thinks of these wanton, cruel women of Biblical times, of Jezebel and Delilah and Salome, of women who dared to have agency and defied their God-given roles as nurturers and keepers of the hearth. Samson, for his part, had his eyes gouged out, and by the grace of God, brought down the temple of his enemies, signing the warrant for the destruction of himself and those who had wronged him, martyred and revered for the strength of his faith. And what of Delilah? Buried, too, in the annals of history and religion, and reviled, for taking only what was freely given to her. 

Sooner or later, he and Cassian will destroy each other, the natural conclusion of love. His father had not always been… cruel. The little house in the forest, where Jizabel felt truly at peace before everything fell apart,  _ that _ had been real. It matters not what his father’s intentions were. For a time, he truly believed he was loved, which is to say that love exists in the beloved, and it is possible to stockpile that bounty and subsist on what remains over the long winter. And this, whatever Cassian is offering, that, too, can be hoarded until it is taken away from him again. He sees again Cassian’s shaven head split open like eggshell, a cavernous crater where his brain used to be. He does not know which of them will shear the other’s hair next time. 

Cassian lies next to him, his eyes sad and gentle set in Cassandra’s eye sockets. Cassian knows only the sad child he had been, carries the guilt of inaction in those eyes, and knows nothing at all. Cassian is in love with a memory and a feeling, and Jizabel looks back into those eyes, sees only Cassandra’s shocked face the moment before his death.

Zenopia’s words come to him. Cassandra’s research at Delilah. What is to say that Cassian is not another manufactured self, another experiment? He thinks of the Tower, of that tenderness, and wants to scream. 

Is it possible to see into someone’s soul through the eyes? Or is it perhaps better to live one’s own life in ignorance. For a brief moment, he thinks of Oedipus and his atonement, of burrowing his fingers into his own skull and ripping out his eyes. Then, it will no longer matter the shape of Cassian’s body. If he plugs his ears, he won’t hear Cassian’s changed voice. If he severs his spinal cord, he won’t feel Cassian’s touch, won’t reach out with his own hands and map the contour of that body with whom he had once been so intimate. He thinks of why he is clinging so desperately onto life, why he devises these contrived plans, when the simplest way out lies one opened vein ahead. 

Cassian texted him earlier today, but he does not think today is a good day to see Cassian. He is alone in his apartment, and Mikaela scuttles on the ground and onto the bookshelf, the counter, and he watches her go. He thinks he would also like to run, but his body is drained of energy and substance. He does not remember the last time he ate. Perhaps it had been with Cassian, and even then, it was but a show he put on for a very attentive crowd.

He is tired. Living this life for others, an object for someone else’s rage or affection. It is all the same, at the receiving end. 

The phone rings. 

“Cas,” he says quietly, picking up without glancing at the caller ID. 

Cassian’s voice through the phone is a little garbled. Jizabel remembers that he has never talked to Cassandra over the phone. There hasn’t been much talking on his part at all.

“Hey, I just wanted to check in.”

Cassian’s voice is soft, a little concerned, but all Jizabel hears is what is left unspoken. 

_ Why haven’t you called. What’s wrong with you. What are we even doing. _

“I’m fine,” he lies easily. “Listen. I think… I shouldn’t be doing this over the phone, but since you called... “

The phone crackles quietly, ambient noise from wherever Cassian is. God, he doesn’t even know where Cassian lives. What are they doing.

“You asked if I would give this a try. I did. I think it’s time to end it.”

He doesn’t know what he expects. His veins are full of ice, and he watches himself in that room, half shrouded in shadows, a figure silently awaiting the tolling of a bell. 

Finally, Cassian responds. “Alright,” Cassian says, a strange note in his voice. It sounds… sad, but Jizabel doesn’t have the words to describe the different shades of sadness. “You did give it a try. Thank you.”

“I’m sorry,” Jizabel says automatically, not feeling very sorry, but even as he tries to avoid social conventions, some things are more ingrained. “You’ve been… very good to me. But I don’t think it…  _ we _ are a good fit.”

Cassian is silent for a while. “Jizabel, I… I’m sorry if I ever did anything to make you uncomfortable. You’re right. It was a selfish request on my part. I shouldn’t have pushed. But, if you ever need me, I’ll be there. Anytime. Just… call me.”

Jizabel hangs up. There is a numbness in his soul, a severance of something he never noticed existed. He sets the phone down next to him, replaying the conversation in his head. 

There is a shadow in his peripheral vision. He lifts his head, stares into the darkness of the kitchen, and is not surprised by what he sees. 

Death has not changed much about Cassandra. He is clothed in the same kind of foppish, overdressed outfits he used to wear indiscriminately around the house. His hair is in that same greased style, his air arrogant, and Jizabel is struck by how truly different Cassian looks from the body he has inherited. 

Cassandra leans against the counter, a boneless feline. “My dear, I think it’s time we have a talk about what happened.”

_ No, I think not. _

“You carved up two bodies on those slabs. Which of us did you mourn, Jizabel?”

_ Neither. Both. You. Him. _

Cassandra has no need for his answers. 

“You are scared to touch him, to look at him. You flinch when he brushes against you. I have to wonder, my dear, if the reason is as you think. You’re not afraid that he is me.” Cassandra’s voice turns into a deep growl, guttural and amplified. “You want it to be me. You hate him for not being me.”

_ Not true. Not true.  _

“Poor little Cassian. Just a child playing dressed up. That’s what you think, is that right? You can’t wrap your head around it, what you did. Why did you do it, Jizabel? Why did you choose him?”

_ I didn’t choose him. I didn’t choose anyone. I never had a choice. _

“You see in me the vestiges of Alexis. You would rather have any piece that remained of him than literally all this world has to offer. You secretly loved what we had, the loss of control, the submission. But you chose Cassian. Why?”

_ I didn’t. I don’t. I don’t know. I let him go. _

“Could it be that deep in your heart of heart, in the part you even tried to hide from me all those years ago, that you actually detest your father? Do you actually think you can do better?”

_ No. Implausible. I love Father. Father, please, listen. _

Alexis looks faintly disappointed in the corner of the room. His legs are crossed, and his arms spread on the armrests as if it were a throne on the dais of Delilah’s gathering room. “I always knew you were a sinner, my child,” he says with a hint of reproach. “Incalcitrant, willful, disobedient. And ungrateful for all that I have given you. A serpent in my nest. Tell me, when you first heard of my death, did you rejoice?”

_ I love you so much it hurts. Father, please. _

He wants to talk back, to refute. It is all wrong. Cassandra and his father are not the same. Cassandra and Cassian are not the same. He knows all this, and yet he does not. 

“Jizabel, do you dare to think you deserve love?” He does not know if it is Cassandra or Alexis, and he runs.

The specters hang just behind, and it takes all he has not to glance back at his father. Jizabel makes his way into the bathroom, draws a bath as hot as the tap would allow, and sees his reflection staring back at him in the mirror. His hair hangs in a braid behind him, unbrushed since the very early morning, and the work day has only added little snags onto the thick plaited cord. His mother’s face, with his mother’s hair, and Cassandra’s fingers running through it, Cassian’s hesitating hand trailing softly at the tip of his braid.

All of a sudden, he cannot find it in himself to wait for his own Delilah to come and cut it all away. He rushes back out to the kitchen, the specters watching him silently, and grabs at the pair of kitchen scissors in the cutlery drawer. A quick snip, and the whole braid falls, thick and heavy like a horse tail whisk, and he lets it fall in the middle of the kitchen floor. His own life, his own hands. He can control the narrative.

The bath is almost full. He chances a glance at the mirror on his way back to the bathroom, seeing his own defiant face freed of the heavy length of hair. It falls unevenly just above his shoulders, a cut that can be described generously as avant-garde, and he is glad. He has shed at least something of his mother even as she stares back at him from the eyes they share. 

He sheds his clothes and climbs into the bathtub, his phone in his hand. He scrolls aimlessly through the news, reading everything and nothing, and falls sleepily into the lull of the hot bath. 

_ If you ever want to get out of that black cage… _

All at once, the pain of what he has done comes. Cassian’s resigned voice, has it not always been resigned? Cassian knew from the start that this was doomed to fail, and yet, why did he persist? 

The memories come, gentle as a ripple in a shallow pond. Cassian’s sad gaze, his sadder smile, the quiet way he gives comfort through presence alone. The doting, the nagging, the utter concern and silent despair. Perhaps it is different, whatever it is, from Father’s all-consuming love, from Cassandra’s hunger and control.

_ Don’t hesitate to call me. _

Won’t he give it a try? Another time, and another time, and another time.

What if he made a mistake?

“You were just trying to find someone who isn’t me so you can convince yourself that I meant nothing to you,” Cassandra says from the door, his eyes glinting in the darkness. “He is me, just in negatives.”

Jizabel narrows his eyes. “You think too much of yourself,” he throws out. The steam from the bath blurs his vision, and Cassandra’s image sways a little as Jizabel blinks away the vapor. 

But there is a bit of truth in what Cassandra says. Cassian is as different from Cassandra as can be. 

Cassandra would never let him go just like that. 

Cassian picks up the phone immediately after the first ring. “Hello?” he asks, the tone of one afraid of being bitten.

“We should talk,” Jizabel says. “Come over if you can.”

He hangs up. It is a conversation best had in person, however it ends.

The heat has turned oppressive, his skin shriveling from the long soak. He pulls himself out of the bath. A wave of dizziness hits, pulls him under, and he grasps for the wall, finding nothing, and before darkness rushes to meet him and his head strikes the ground, he sees the shades of Cassandra and his father standing at the door, watching silently, grim smiles on their faces.

* * *

He remembers bits and pieces of what happened afterward, and he wishes he doesn’t. One minute, the world is a cacophony of stimuli, and the next, he must be floating in a sensory deprivation tank. He remembers the ride on the ambulance, the urgent voices of the paramedics, the flurry of movements and hands touching his head, and Cassian’s face, stricken with fear and tears. Jizabel is so angry and relieved and afraid. He doesn’t want these hands on his skin, hates the way they treat him as if he isn’t there.  _ I’m still here, _ he wants to scream,  _ let me go. _ Cassandra’s face, or Cassian’s face, swims to the forefront of his consciousness, and he wants to strike out, but his arms don’t obey him anymore. 

_ You little whore,  _ Cassandra had said.

_ If you ever want to get out of that black cage... _

Someone straps an oxygen mask over his face, and before he can protest, he is already gone.

* * *

It’s morning, or so Jizabel surmises from the glow of the curtains. It can also be afternoon, but he just recently woke up, and he doesn’t think he slept all that long for it to be so late in the day already. Cassandra’s lips are thin and pressed into a stern line, an expression that he had rarely seen on this particular face, and Jizabel suddenly feels like a misbehaving child in front of this man. He has to look away, pretending instead to busy himself with picking a loose thread from the hospital sheet. 

He woke up alone earlier, in the middle of the night. A nurse came to check in on him. He had fallen and hit his head against the bathtub on his way down. Head wounds bleed a lot, but he should be okay. It is a light concussion. They are only keeping him for observation, awaiting a complete lab work up. He’s hooked up on fluids and a mild painkiller, and he should try to eat something, really, so he drank a sip of the smoothie she brought and lied, claiming an upset stomach. 

When he wakes up again, Cassandra is there.

Cassandra’s voice comes out with that same pleasant baritone, but the cadence is off, and the words are not what he expects. “Did I do something wrong?”

“What do you mean?” Jizabel asks, genuinely confused and beginning to feel anger stir.  _ It is not about you. How dare you. _

Cassandra—no, Cassian—sighs, his handsome face clouded with weariness, and he reaches up to smooth the beanie over his head. A new nervous habit, Jizabel notes. “You can barely stand to look at me. And then this-” He gestures to the hospital bed, to the tubes and wires and Jizabel’s emaciated frame. “When I came over and found you… the hair, the blood… I thought… Never mind. How are you feeling today?”

“Fine,” Jizabel replies stiffly. His head aches a little, the bandages around his head too tight. It is nothing he hasn’t experienced before. 

“Do you want me to go away again?” Cassian asks, looking as if he already knows what the answer should be.

Jizabel thinks for a while and shakes his head, the movement sending the room into a dizzying whirl. “Stay,” he says cautiously. 

“They said you fainted because of the prolonged heat and the… starvation.” Cassian meets his gaze, and he shrinks back. “You haven’t been eating again.”

Jizabel does not dignify that with an answer. He sighs, pats at the bed, signalling that Cassian should sit down, and Cassian does. They do not touch, but he can feel Cassian’s warmth heating up the air. 

“When you call me Cas,” Cassian broaches haltingly, hands gripping the edges of his sweater. “Do you mean to say Cassian or Cassandra?”

“What?”

“That day when I came in and you were passed out. You said his name in your sleep. Cassandra. I didn’t know you two were… close.”

“We were not close.” Jizabel sighs. Not in that sense. For all that Cassandra could see into him, the other man was an opaque puzzle to Jizabel. A monster under thick colored glass, roaring unintelligible sounds.

_ We were very close, my darling. Have you forgotten? _

Cassian’s lips are pressed into a firm line. “I didn’t work with him directly, before, but I’ve heard of him. Know his face. I know what he did, or supposedly did. Did you two work together?”

“No,” Jizabel replies hollowly. Delilah will never let him go. His father will never let him go. “I didn’t know about him until after.”

“After what?”

“Nothing. Until a long time after we first met. He was just my neighbor. I didn’t know he was Delilah.” 

“Did you sleep together?”

Jizabel stiffens. His hands, which were toying with the frayed thread of his hospital-issued blanket, still. “That’s none of your business.”

“So you have.”  _ You little whore _ , he hears. Cassian’s and Cassandra’s voices are one. They are, now.

“You know what this looks like to me?” Cassian’s eyes seek him desperately. “It looks like you repeatedly rejected my advances when I was like before, and then chose your ideal body to graft me into, which, at least, makes it sound as if you at least cared a little bit about me, as a person. But also, it looks like your lover died, and you wanted to preserve him, so you transferred me in to keep him alive. So which is it, Jizabel? Which of us are you really talking to?”

_ I don’t know _ , Jizabel thinks and curls into himself.  _ Every time I look at you, I see both of you. I don’t know which is real.  _

_ You know whom you want to be real.  _

“Is there a difference?” he asks.

Cassian looks as if he has been slapped. This time, it is Cassian who runs away, and Jizabel wishes he, too, can leave.

It hurts. He marvels at how much it hurts, the sensation of a new type of pain. His whole life, chasing after the unattainable, letting others chase him in return and never granting what they seek. It felt good, like control and power, and empty. Death spends his days with ghosts, alive but not living. 

_ What are you afraid of? _

Cassian is kind. Cassian does not push, only asks, and he follows where he is led. Cassian has never done anything to him. Cassian saved his life, took a bullet in the chest. So what is he afraid of?

He thinks of the Tower, of Cain, of their farcical relationship that he still has not managed to ruin. He has known about that experiment, but he did not know it was Cassandra behind the research.

_ What if this is also not real? _

_ Does it matter? _

Cain and Riff are happy. Can he choose to be happy? He remembers Cain’s face when he speaks of Riff, just a brief mention, and the way his eyes light up just minutely. Is it possible for the thought of a manufactured person to bring such joy? 

_ Does it matter? _

_ Chase after Cassian. Ask him to return. Choose him.  _

_ Trust him. _

The tubes and wires fall away from him in bursts of red, and he stumbles off the bed in his attempt to follow, his limbs folding helplessly under him. The room spins. He sees Cassian rushing back to his side, and he makes a weak attempt to push the other man away with little efficacy. He wants to tell Cassian that he was sorry, that he didn’t mean it, that he did mean it, that Cassian should forgive him, that Cassian should leave him the fuck alone, that Cassian is a monster he created and that Cassian is too good a person to be stuck with him, that he needs his father, that he hates his father, that he wants to die, that he’s afraid of dying, that he really doesn’t want to be saved, but that he needs to be.

He can’t breathe. He thinks he’s crying. He thinks he might be struggling against Cassian’s hold.  _ I’m dying _ , he tells himself, _ this is what I want _ . He’s afraid. He’s so afraid.  __ Cassian’s former face, flushed with concern, comes unbidden. He wills himself to stop struggling, to still the terror in his heart, to let himself be led, breathless, away from the chaos in his head.

Cassian’s body is so warm. He wonders if this might be what love feels like. Maybe it doesn’t have to hurt.

He hears Cassian call out to the nurse, panic in his voice, and he doesn’t hear anymore.

_ Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades. _

* * *

It’s the stress. They said he had a panic attack and fainted. They would like to keep him a while longer for observation. And they are rather concerned about his lab results, about the damage to his organs, and on and on about things he already knows.

He’s hooked up to more wires and tubes than he thinks is decent. The skin on his hand is papery thin and gray like smoke, and the bruises where the needles have pierced his skin are dark purple. He thinks they must be spreading and briefly considers a version of himself in purple, deciding then and there that it must be an improvement on how he looks now.

Cassian hasn’t come back since the incident, and it has been almost three days since. Cain is sitting next to him now, face worn and eyes tight. He looks like he hasn’t slept well in weeks, but then again, neither has Jizabel. 

“Hi,” Cain opens tentatively. 

He makes a sound that passes for a greeting.

“Your… boss called me,” Cain explains, hesitating over the word as if it would offend Jizabel. “Apparently I’m listed as your emergency contact.” 

He hums noncommittally. The machine beeps, his pulse slightly tachycardic. He thinks of the biofeedback therapy lecture he attended months ago and concludes that his traitorous body must be feeling quite anxious. In his mind, it is quiet, for once.

Cain tilts his head and examines him, eyes scanning from the top of his head to his lower body, hidden beneath the bulge of the blanket. “Is it true, then? That you… collapsed?”

_ What does it matter, _ he muses.  _ I’m still here, aren’t I? _

Cain looks disappointed at his silence, bone weary, and in that moment, Jizabel sees the mirage of his father, sees the man that Cain will soon grow up to be. His brother is just twenty, but time flies, and the innocence of youth has already left Cain. 

He’s frightened, but he can’t get enough. The desire to reach for Cain’s hand is overwhelming. The desire to throttle Cain with his thready hands weighs like an anvil on his chest.

“Is this… about Father?” Cain asks warily, averting his gaze.

“Everything in my life is about Father,” Jizabel responds, weary.

“Father is gone,” Cain insists.

Jizabel chuckles bitterly. His brother still has much to learn. His own demons will come calling, one day.

They sit in silence for several eternities, the machines’ whirring and beeping the only breaks. “Do you ever think we’ll be brothers again?” Cain asks finally, voice surprisingly vulnerable. “Will you always hate me?”   
  
“Those are very different questions, Cain,” he replies, the words stuck in his throat and raspy, mind already far away from the conversation, “and I think you already know the answers to them.”

Cain chuckles, but it sounds more like a sob. “You look like hell, Jizabel. Your hair...” he mourns, reaching out a hand as if to touch Jizabel’s shorn locks, but he retracts it suddenly as if he had just remembered that one should not touch venomous creatures. “You look like you could be Mr. Rochester’s wife in the attic.” The joke is crass, but it feels natural coming from Cain. For some reasons, it makes him feel a bit better. More normal, if such a state is still possible for him.

“And you his plain Jane little trinket,” he deadpans, half yearning to be touched, half repulsed at how close Cain has gotten to him. He wonders if Cain’s hands would feel like Father’s on his skin. He wonders if, had he a scalpel, Cain’s skin would break open beneath the blade, if Cain’s lewdly striking eyes would feel smooth as marbles in his palm. He quite likes this imagery and smiles, floating pleasantly on a cloud of benzo.

Cain takes a deep breath. “I think you should move back to England with me,” he finally says, apprehension coloring his voice. “And see a psychologist again.” 

_ Neil would rather shut me up in an asylum.  _ He knows all too well what the family thinks of him, of the madness in his blood.

Jizabel doesn’t think Cain’s nonsense deserves a reply, so he turns away, hands clasped serenely on his stomach. What good would any of it do? He’s not unfamiliar with psychotherapy, but that world is filled with softness and compassion and empathy, and he is too hard, too brittle. He is iron cutting through water, and sooner or later, he will rust.

“Jizabel, please. For your sake. For Mary’s sake. You can’t keep going like this.” 

Being stubborn is a Hargreaves trait, and Jizabel thinks that that must be the bond they share, if nothing else.

“Don’t tell Mary,” he sighs. 

Cain looks displeased. “Do you want to get better?”

Jizabel takes a long time to reply. He has never lied to his brother, not for things that matter; if anything, the honesty between them is too brutal. It may also be the Ativan slowing his thoughts, but he can’t tell for sure.

“I don’t know.” 

Cain doesn’t ask any more questions. 

* * *

His colleagues come to see him once, furtive and awkward and miserable. He doesn’t respond to any of their questions, and the lot sits in silence, House inconspicuously absent.

Cameron tries to pat his hand, but he draws back, and they make meaningless small talks until Foreman excuses himself and the other two follow.

They don’t come back after that, and he is glad.

* * *

Cain comes back. He visits often, once every two days, and brings with him tales of the outside world. Jizabel never listens fully, but he does appreciate the inane chattering. 

Sometimes Riff comes with him, a quiet, deferential shadow in the corner, and Jizabel does a good job at completely ignoring the butler. He remembers the butler protagonist from Kazuo Ishiguro’s book  _ The Remains of the Day _ , which is one of his favorite novels, and thinks about how Riff compares to Mr. Stevens, so proud of his craft. He wonders what it must be like to devote one’s life to someone so. It’s a particularly English trait, he thinks, and mourns that his current life is so terribly, irrevocably American.

He hates them. Hated them. Hates. He hates Riff for taking up so much of Cain’s attention, for daring to step between their nonexistent brotherly bond, for being so favored by Cain’s trust and confidence. He hates Cain for being so loved, for not loving him, for being the one true wanted son, for being a murderer, for being his brother in blood alone. He pities them for their farce of love, built atop a perilous tower. He envies them for believing so deeply in their own lies. He tries so hard to be a believer, but in the silence of the night, all he can believe in is his own pain and sins.

And yet, as he waits for the Tower to crumble, he cannot find it in himself to set fire to its foundation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> House returns in the next chapter.


End file.
